Adaptive Bitrate Control Mechanism Based on Long-Term Evaluation
Pierre Lebreton, Kazuhisa Yamagishi · 2022 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) · 2022
This paper addresses the improvement of the quality expe-rienced by users while using adaptive bitrate (ABR) video streaming by considering long-term aspects in the chunk se-lection process. Compared with traditional approaches that select chunks on the basis of predicted immediate throughput value, leveraging long-term throughput values can enable a long-term chunk selection strategy to be defined that enables perceived quality to be increased in challenging network con-ditions. In results for real-world throughput measurements, quality was improved by at least 0.5 units on a five-grade mean opinion score (MOS) in up to 60% of tested challenging network conditions thanks to the increase in the time frame in the chunk selection mechanism. Furthermore, using a long-term chunk selection mechanism was shown to enable higher quality to be maintained than short-term approaches when throughput prediction becomes noisy. The proposed approach was shown to benefit a quality-centric ABR control scheme but is also applicable to other ABR algorithms.