Fleet: Improving Quality of Experience for Low-Latency Live Video Streaming

Abstract

Low-latency live video streaming proposes more challenges on designing Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) algorithms than video-on-demand streaming. In this paper, we present Fleet, a solution that improves user quality of experience (QoE) in terms of video quality, video switches, video freezes, and latency. Fleet is designed to meet two operational challenges at the same time: (1) optimizing QoE under dynamic mobile network conditions and (2) ensuring a low latency experience with minimal visual quality degradation. The core of Fleet is a stochastic model predictive controller that incorporates network conditions and client states for bitrate adaptation. The idle period problem presents great challenges for bandwidth measurement and client state prediction. Fleet consists of an HTTP chunk level bandwidth measurement algorithm, and a practical live video streaming evolution model for client state prediction. Besides, a throughput probability predictor is trained to capture the mobile network’s uncertainty. And, a triple threshold playback speed controller is designed for latency management. Fleet is practically implemented in dash.js and evaluated over both synthetic and real-world mobile network conditions. Our study shows that compared with the state-of-the-art solution, Fleet achieves an average QoE improvement of 39.7% and 37.9%, respectively. Moreover, Fleet has a good generalization, outperforming existing algorithms even on new video traces and network conditions.