Exploiting Video Quality Information With Lightweight Network Coordination for HTTP-Based Adaptive Video Streaming

Abstract

This paper investigates how video-quality information can be exploited by HTTP-based adaptive streaming clients in their rate adaptation schemes. We also seek to answer the question: How much network coordination is required to achieve quality fairness across multiple competing clients? To that end, we envision a loosely coupled architecture where a lightweight centralized coordinator complements multiple federated quality-aware clients. Instead of actively programming network bandwidth allocation to each client, in our proposed architecture, the central coordinator simply collects quality and buffer level information from individual clients and publishes the aggregate quality statistics as reference. Such global reference statistics help to guide each federated client to self-tune its aggressiveness in its quality-aware adaptation scheme. Testbed-based evaluations show that such a lightweight approach is effective in reaping most of the performance gains previously achieved by a centralized joint optimization scheme. Compared to both state-of-the-art rate-based clients and independent quality-aware clients, our proposed federated quality-aware scheme can save up to 50% of total bandwidth while maintaining comparable aggregate video quality across all clients.