Improving fairness, efficiency, and stability in HTTP-based adaptive video streaming with FESTIVE

  • Authors:

  • Junchen Jiang;Vyas Sekar;Hui Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Pittsburgh, USA;Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Pittsburgh, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Many commercial video players rely on bitrate adaptation logic to adapt the bitrate in response to changing network conditions. Past measurement studies have identified issues with today's commercial players with respect to three key metrics---efficiency, fairness, and stability---when multiple bitrate-adaptive players share a bottleneck link. Unfortunately, our current understanding of why these effects occur and how they can be mitigated is quite limited. In this paper, we present a principled understanding of bitrate adaptation and analyze several commercial players through the lens of an abstract player model. Through this framework, we identify the root causes of several undesirable interactions that arise as a consequence of overlaying the video bitrate adaptation over HTTP. Building on these insights, we develop a suite of techniques that can systematically guide the tradeoffs between stability, fairness and efficiency and thus lead to a general framework for robust video adaptation. We pick one concrete instance from this design space and show that it significantly outperforms today's commercial players on all three key metrics across a range of experimental scenarios.