An Efficient Mobile Video Streaming Rate Selection Technique based on Wireless Network Characteristics
Suehee Pak · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2017
Explosive deployment of smart mobile devices such as smart phones, and tablets along with expansion of wireless internet bandwidth have enabled the deployment of mobile video streaming such that video traffic becomes the most important service in wireless networks. Recently, for more efficient video streaming services, the ISO MPEG group standardized a protocol called DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) and the standard has been quickly adopted by many service providers such as YouTube and Netflix. Despite of the convenience of mobile streaming services, users also suffer from low QoE(Quality of Experience) due to dynamic channel fluctuations and unnecessary downloading due to high churning rates. This paper proposes a noble efficient video rate selection algorithm considering user buffer level, channel condition and churning rate. Computer simulation based performance study showed that the proposed algorithm improved the QoE significantly compared to a method that determines the video rate based on current channel conditions. Especially, the proposed method reduced the rebuffering rate, one of the most important performance factors of the QoE, to a nonnegligible level.