Online Server-Side Optimization Approach for Improving QoE of DASH Clients

The many advantages of Dynamic Adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) made it one of the most prevalent video streaming technologies in recent years. Unfortunately, many studies have unveiled the QoE issue of users when multiple DASH clients compete for the bandwidth of a bottleneck link. This issue consists of several aspects, namely the frequent encoding changes, the unfair bandwidth allocation, the inefficient bandwidth utilization, and the relatively long convergence time. These aspects are indeed conflicting each other and resolving them entails tradeoffs. In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model that leverages a score matrix to ensure a fair sharing of the server's bottleneck link between competing clients and satisfies the requests of as many clients as possible and that is for efficient bandwidth utilization. The proposed solution is compared against notable solutions through computer-based simulations, and the results show that the proposed solution achieves high scores in terms of both efficiency and fairness.