Rate Adaptation for HTTP Video Streaming to Improve the QoE in Multi-client Environments

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) adaptive streaming has become a new trend in video delivery. An HTTP adaptive streaming client needs to effectively estimate resource availability and demand. However, due to the bitrate of the video encoded in variable bitrate (VBR) mode, a bitrate mismatch problem occurs. With the rising demand for mobile devices, the likelihood of cases where two or more HTTP adaptive streaming clients share the same network bottleneck and competing for available bandwidth will increase. These mismatch and competition issues lead to network congestion, which adversely affects the Quality of Experience (QoE). To solve these problem, we propose a video rate adaptation scheme for the HTTP video streaming to guarantee and optimize the QoE. The proposed scheme estimates the available bandwidth according to the bitrate of each segment and also schedules the segment request time to expedite the response to the bandwidth variation. We used a multi-client simulation to prove that our scheme can effectively cope with drastic changes in the connection throughput and video bitrate.