Measuring DASH streaming performance from the end users perspective using neubot

Abstract

The popularity of DASH streaming is rapidly increasing and a number of commercial streaming services are adopting this new standard. While the benefits of building streaming services on top of the HTTP protocol are clear, further work is still necessary to evaluate and enhance the system performance from the perspective of the end user. Here we present a novel framework to evaluate the performance of rate-adaptation algorithms for DASH streaming using network measurements collected from more than a thousand Internet clients. Data, which have been made publicly available, are collected by a DASH module built on top of Neubot, an open source tool for the collection of network measurements. Some examples about the possible usage of the collected data are given, ranging from simple analysis and performance comparisons of download speeds to the performance simulation of alternative adaptation strategies using, e.g., the instantaneous available bandwidth values.