QoE evaluation of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) with promising transport layer protocols

Abstract

Recently, dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) has become an increasingly popular way to view video over the Internet. In particular compared to other video streaming services these DASH approaches deliver superior QoE to viewers. This is due to improved video segment selection. Generally, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) CUBIC is the defacto transport layer protocol use by DASH. To improve the robustness of the transport layer to network congestion many other TCP variants were implemented such as Compound TCP and BBR. Nevertheless some were made to work specifically in LAN environments for example Agile-SD. However, recently another transport layer protocol User Datagram Protocol (UDP) has been used in Google’s QUIC implementation. To date no work has be found giving the performance of these transport layer protocols with DASH. In this paper we test the performance of Agile-SD, CUBIC, Compound TCP, BBR and QUIC using the BBA, MPC, Pensieve and Oboe DASH approaches. Experiments simulate congested bottleneck link conditions common at household routers where families view multiple videos at the same time. We observe Oboe and Agile-SD is the most promising combination with CUBIC and Pensieve next. However, even though QUIC was touted to have superior transport layer performance by Google it was the worst performing.