TY - GEN

T1 - Stochastic Guarantees for Rate-Adaptive Streaming

AU - Akselrod, Mark

AU - Fidler, Markus

AU - Lübben, Ralf

N1 - Funding Information: * This work was supported by the Soongsil University Research Fund.

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - A major challenge in mobile video streaming applications is the variability of the wireless channel. Techniques like Apple's HLS and MPEG-DASH typically offer the video in chunks where each chunk is made available with different levels of quality and bitrate. Adaptive clients use estimates of the past network conditions to select the source bitrate of the next chunk accordingly. Frequently, this selection is based on the average performance and does not consider the variability of the channel. In this work, we present a method for bitrate adaptation that uses the distribution of the past throughput to provide statistical performance guarantees obtained by the stochastic network calculus. We show how to select the bitrate so that a certain, small probability of buffer underflow is not exceeded. Theoretical results are derived for the general case of an arbitrary throughput distribution. Numerical results are included for the example of a Gaussian distribution. Additionally, we present simulation results that show the relevant performance metrics like average bitrate and buffer level of a system that adjusts its bitrate as suggested by our method. Generally, the method presented in this paper can achieve a bitrate that is close to the average available throughput with little variability of the source bitrate, while limiting the probability of buffer underflow to a predefined level.

AB - A major challenge in mobile video streaming applications is the variability of the wireless channel. Techniques like Apple's HLS and MPEG-DASH typically offer the video in chunks where each chunk is made available with different levels of quality and bitrate. Adaptive clients use estimates of the past network conditions to select the source bitrate of the next chunk accordingly. Frequently, this selection is based on the average performance and does not consider the variability of the channel. In this work, we present a method for bitrate adaptation that uses the distribution of the past throughput to provide statistical performance guarantees obtained by the stochastic network calculus. We show how to select the bitrate so that a certain, small probability of buffer underflow is not exceeded. Theoretical results are derived for the general case of an arbitrary throughput distribution. Numerical results are included for the example of a Gaussian distribution. Additionally, we present simulation results that show the relevant performance metrics like average bitrate and buffer level of a system that adjusts its bitrate as suggested by our method. Generally, the method presented in this paper can achieve a bitrate that is close to the average available throughput with little variability of the source bitrate, while limiting the probability of buffer underflow to a predefined level.

KW - buffer underflow

KW - de jitter buffer

KW - MPEG-DASH

KW - network calculus

KW - rate-adaptive streaming

KW - stochastic guarantees

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85057194975&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1109/itc30.2018.10056

DO - 10.1109/itc30.2018.10056

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85057194975

SN - 978-0-9883045-5-0

SP - 19

EP - 24

BT - Proceedings of the 2018 International Workshop on Network Calculus and Applications (NetCal2018)

A2 - Altman, Eitan

A2 - Bianchi, Giuseppe

A2 - Zinner, Thomas

PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

T2 - 2018 International Workshop on Network Calculus and Applications, NetCal2018

Y2 - 3 September 2018 through 7 September 2018

ER -