HAVS: hybrid adaptive video streaming for mobile devices

Abstract

This paper presents a new Scalable Video Codec (SVC)-based hybrid adaptive video streaming scheme, named HAVS, for mobile devices in wireless environments. The proposed approach takes two existing video streaming technologies, viz., progressive download and adaptive streaming, and switches them in a hybrid manner. To this end, HAVS employs the H.264/SVC encoding scheme, where each video chunk is encoded into one base layer and several enhancement layers. Since clients request the base layer every time a video is streamed, HAVS performs progressive download for the base layer and adaptive streaming for the enhancement layers. Through wireless test-bed experiments, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme can be easily implemented on mobile devices without any server-side modification. This scheme effectively prevents video freeze thereby providing better quality video streaming than the existing non-hybrid streaming technologies.