A model for evaluating sharing policies for network-assisted HTTP adaptive streaming

Jan Willem Kleinrouweler*, Sergio Cabrero, Rob van der Mei, Pablo Cesar

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
32 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) has become the dominant technology for streaming video over the Internet. It gained popularity because of its ability to adapt the video quality to the current network conditions and other appealing properties such as usage of off-the-shelf HTTP servers and easy firewall traversal. However, when multiple HAS players share a bottleneck link for streaming, the individual adaptation techniques in the players have difficulties to maintain a stable bitrate and fairly share the network resources. HAS-assisting network elements can solve these performance problems and allow execution of advanced policies for sharing the available bandwidth. Nonetheless, testing and evaluating new sharing policies is costly and time consuming. This motivated us to formulate a model that allows to differentiate between groups of users depending on the type of user or device, and that can describe the mean bitrate of the video streams and how often this bitrate is expected to change during playout. To show how our model can be used, we demonstrate two applications of our model. Furthermore, we validate the model based results against results obtained using our streaming testbed and proxy server based HAS-assistant. The results show that our model is highly accurate for both the mean bitrate and the number of changes in video bitrate. As such, our model is a useful tool for network administrators and internet service providers for evaluating the performance of sharing policies and for managing and provisioning video delivery networks.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)234-245
Number of pages12
JournalComputer Networks
Volume109
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Nov 2016

Bibliographical note

Accepted Author Manuscript

Keywords

  • Bitrate
  • Capacity sharing
  • Fairness
  • HTTP adaptive streaming
  • Instability
  • Markov model
  • Performance
  • Video streaming

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