CDN and SDN Support and Player Interaction for HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming

Video streaming has become one of the most prevailing, bandwidth-hungry, and latency-sensitive Internet applications. HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become the dominant video delivery mechanism over the Internet. Lack of coordination among the clients and lack of awareness of the network in pure client-based adaptive video bitrate approaches have caused problems, such as sub-optimal data throughput from Content Delivery Network (CDN) or origin servers, high CDN costs, and non-satisfactory users' experience. Recent studies have shown that network-assisted HAS techniques by utilizing modern networking paradigms, e.g., Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and edge computing can significantly improve HAS system performance. In this doctoral study, we leverage the aforementioned modern networking paradigms and design network-assistance for/by HAS clients to improve HAS systems performance and CDN/network utilization. We present four fundamental research questions to target different challenges in devising a network-assisted HAS system.