Adaptive bitrate video delivery using HTTP/2 over MPTCP architecture
Brian Hayes, Yusun Chang, George Riley · 2017
Adaptive bitrate streaming is one of the most popular methods to deliver high definition video content for HTTP clients. Commonly used techniques rely primarily on the estimation of network bandwidth and/or buffer state client-side. Inaccurate estimation leads to performance degradation due to a lack of correct bitrate encoding per chunk, and poor network utilization as a result of inflexible transport protocols. In this paper, we propose a unique approach to removing the client-side estimation of network bandwidth and buffer state. Three modular HTTP/2 server push-based strategies leveraging Multipath TCP are designed to improve the delivery of the video content in lossy environments. The goal is to improve start-up delay and overall performance. Laboratory experiments reveal that the start-up buffering delay is decreased by 40% or more when using HTTP/2 over MPTCP in networks with packet loss rates above 2%.