Adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming is the de facto solution for achieving smooth viewing experiences under unstable network conditions. However, most of the existing rate adaptation approaches for ABR are content-agnostic, without considering the semantic information of the video content. Nevertheless, semantic information largely determines the informativeness and interestingness of the video content, and consequently affects the QoE for video streaming. One common case is that the user may expect higher quality for the parts of video content that are more interesting or informative so as to reduce overall subjective quality loss. This creates two main challenges for such a problem: First, how to determine which parts of the video content are more interesting? Second, how to allocate bitrate budgets for different parts of the video content with different significances? To address these challenges, we propose a Content-of-Interest (CoI) based rate adaptation scheme for ABR. We first design a deep learning approach for recognizing the interestingness of the video content, and then design a Deep Q-Network (DQN) approach for rate adaptation by incorporating video interestingness information. The experimental results show that our method can recognize video interestingness precisely, and the bitrate allocation for ABR can be aligned with the interestingness of video content while not compromising the performances on objective QoE metrics.
Huang @cite_14 designed a buffer-based approach by considering the current buffer occupancy. Li @cite_1 designed a client-side rate adaptation algorithm by envisioning a general probe-and-adapt principle. Yin @cite_9 proposed a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach by jointly considering buffer occupancy and bandwidth. Bokani @cite_17 and Zhou @cite_12 adopted Markov Decision Process (MDP) for rate adaptation. Spiteri @cite_3 adopted Lyapunov framework to design an online algorithm to minimize rebuffering and maximize QoE, without requiring bandwidth information. Qin @cite_0 proposed a PID based method for rate adaptation, and Mao @cite_19 adopted deep reinforcement learning for rate adaptation. In this line of works, they mainly considered the objective QoE metrics, aiming to improve the performances on rebuffering time, average bitrate, and video quality variation.
@cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_12 @cite_17
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User-perceived quality-of-experience (QoE) is critical in Internet video applications as it impacts revenues for content providers and delivery systems. Given that there is little support in the network for optimizing such measures, bottlenecks could occur anywhere in the delivery system. Consequently, a robust bitrate adaptation algorithm in client-side players is critical to ensure good user experience. Previous studies have shown key limitations of state-of-art commercial solutions and proposed a range of heuristic fixes. Despite the emergence of several proposals, there is still a distinct lack of consensus on: (1) How best to design this client-side bitrate adaptation logic (e.g., use rate estimates vs. buffer occupancy); (2) How well specific classes of approaches will perform under diverse operating regimes (e.g., high throughput variability); or (3) How do they actually balance different QoE objectives (e.g., startup delay vs. rebuffering). To this end, this paper makes three key technical contributions. First, to bring some rigor to this space, we develop a principled control-theoretic model to reason about a broad spectrum of strategies. Second, we propose a novel model predictive control algorithm that can optimally combine throughput and buffer occupancy information to outperform traditional approaches. Third, we present a practical implementation in a reference video player to validate our approach using realistic trace-driven emulations. In this survey, we present state-of-the-art bitrate adaptation algorithms for HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS). As a key distinction from other streaming approaches, the bitrate adaptation algorithms in HAS are chiefly executed at each client, i.e. , in a distributed manner. The objective of these algorithms is to ensure a high quality of experience (QoE) for viewers in the presence of bandwidth fluctuations due to factors like signal strength, network congestion, network reconvergence events, etc. While such fluctuations are common in public Internet, they can also occur in home networksor even managed networks where there is often admission control and QoS tools. Bitrate adaptation algorithms may take factors like bandwidth estimations, playback buffer fullness, device features, viewer preferences, and content features into account, albeit with different weights. Since the viewer’s QoE needs to be determined in real-time during playback, objective metrics are generally used including number of buffer stalls, duration of startup delay, frequency and amount of quality oscillations, and video instability. By design, the standards for HAS do not mandate any particular adaptation algorithm, leaving it to system builders to innovate and implement their own method. This survey provides an overview of the different methods proposed over the last several years. In this paper, we present a proxy-based solution for adapting the scalable video streams at the edge of a wireless network, which can respond quickly to highly dynamic wireless links. Our design adopts the scalable video coding (SVC) technique for lightweight rate adaptation at the edge. We derive a QoE model, i.e., rate-quality tradeoff model, that relates the maximum subjective quality under a given rate by choosing the optimal frame rate and quantization stepsize. The proxy iteratively allocates rates of different video streams to maximize a weighted sum of video qualities associated with different streams, based on the periodically observed link throughputs and the sending buffer status. Simulation studies show that our scheme consistently outperforms TFRC in terms of agility to track link qualities and overall quality of all streams. In addition, the proposed scheme supports differential services for different streams, and competes fairly with TCP flows. Adaptive video streaming improves users' quality of experience (QoE), while using the network efficiently. In the last few years, adaptive video streaming has seen widespread adoption and has attracted significant research effort. We study a dynamic system of random arrivals and departures for different classes of users using the adaptive streaming industry standard DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). Using a Markov chain based analysis, we compute the user QoE metrics: probability of starvation, prefetching delay, average video quality and switching rate. We validate our model by simulations, which show a very close match. Our study of the playout buffer is based on client adaptation scheme, which makes efficient use of the network while improving users' QoE. We prove that for buffer-based variants, the average video bit-rate matches the average channel rate. Hence, we would see quality switches whenever the average channel rate does not match the available video bit rates. We give a sufficient condition for setting the playout buffer threshold to ensure that quality switches only between adjacent quality levels.