What happens when HTTP adaptive streaming players compete for bandwidth?

TLDR

High‑quality video streaming increasingly causes multiple adaptive players to share a bottleneck, leading to instability, unfairness, and bandwidth underutilization, yet the underlying dynamics remain poorly understood. The study investigates how the ON‑OFF behavior of adaptive streaming players causes instability and examines how ON‑OFF durations, bandwidth‑bitrate relationships, and the number of players influence this instability. We experimentally evaluate two adaptive players, observing their ON‑OFF periods and measuring how bandwidth, bitrate choices, and player count affect instability.

Abstract

With an increasing demand for high-quality video content over the Internet, it is becoming more likely that two or more adaptive streaming players share the same network bottleneck and compete for available bandwidth. This competition can lead to three performance problems: player instability, unfairness between players, and bandwidth underutilization. However, the dynamics of such competition and the root cause for the previous three problems are not yet well understood. In this paper, we focus on the problem of competing video players and describe how the typical behavior of an adaptive streaming player in its Steady-State, which includes periods of activity followed by periods of inactivity (ON-OFF periods), is the main root cause behind the problems listed above. We use two adaptive players to experimentally showcase these issues. Then, focusing on the issue of player instability, we test how several factors (the ON-OFF durations, the available bandwidth and its relation to available bitrates, and the number of competing players) affect stability.