Quality Control for Hybrid Unicast and Multicast Video Transmission Systems
Shih‐Hsuan Yang, Tsung-Wei Liu · 2020
The video streaming platforms have recently evolved to provide diversified services, including live video, video on demand, and TV shows premiere. The traditional unicast method may cause a waste of bandwidth when many users watch the same video contents at the same time. In this study, we realized a hybrid unicast and multicast adaptive streaming system. The system uses ROUTE (Real-time Object delivery over Unidirectional Transport) combined with the MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) to simultaneously satisfy the needs of unicast and multicast users. We use the SHVC (Scalable High-efficiency Video Coding) to generate high-quality video of different bitrates. The QoE (Quality of Experience) function is measured by bitrate, PSNR, and server bandwidth. The proposed adaptive algorithm dynamically allocates the bitrates of unicast and multicast users and achieves optimal average viewing quality. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm effectively improves the system's QoE under various bandwidth models compared to the conventional method. In the hybrid multicast and unicast scenario, the PSNR for the stable, incremental, and decreasing bandwidth models are increased by 0.79 dB, 4.92 dB, and 7.88 dB, respectively. The average quality switching frequency of users is also decreased.