Variable-threshold buffer based adaptation for DASH mobile Video Streaming

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) was introduced to enable high video quality streaming over HTTP. DASH depends on the adaptation logic at the client to choose which video bitrate to stream from the content server for each chunk. For clients receiving video over a cellular network, the cellular first hop tends to be the bandwidth bottleneck and can exhibit significant swings in available bandwidth. In this paper we develop and evaluate a Dynamic Adaptation for mobile Video Streaming (DAVS), a technique that can be used within DASH adaptation to handle the significant bandwidth variability experienced by cellular mobile clients. In our scheme the main innovation is that the client chooses a bitrate based on whether the playout buffer occupancy (BO) falls below or above a dynamic threshold. In addition, the scheme attempts to minimize bitrate switching by again delaying a change of video bitrate selection by a window of time - that is also dynamically determined. We evaluate the performance of DAVS over real traces collected from a mobile network operator. DAVS shows better performance over different video streaming metrics. Furthermore, It increases the QoE by a range 15% – 55% compared to benchmark algorithms.