Toward a Principled Framework to Design Dynamic Adaptive Streaming Algorithms over HTTP

Abstract

Client-side bitrate adaptation algorithms play a critical role in delivering a good quality of experience for Internet video. Many studies have shown that current solutions perform suboptimally, and despite the proliferation of several proposals in this space, both from commercial providers and researchers, there is still a distinct lack of clarity and consensus w.r.t. several natural questions: (1) What objectives does/should such an algorithm optimize? (2) What environment signals such as buffer occupancy or throughput estimates should an algorithm use in its control loop? (3) How sensitive is an algorithm to operating conditions (e.g., bandwidth stability, buffer size, available bitrates)? This work attempts to bring clarity to this discussion by casting adaptive bitrate streaming as a model-based predictive control problem. We demonstrate the initial promise of shedding light on these questions using this control-theoretic abstraction.