Speaker:

Lahiru Ariyasinghe, Department of Computer Science

Title:

C-HAS: Adding a coordination scheme to facilitate HAS video players more effectively sharing network bandwidth

Location:

Owheo G34 - 1:00 pm, Friday 24 August

Abstract:

The recent move of most of the over-the-top (OTT) video services (e.g., YouTube, Netflix, etc.) to use HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (HAS) as the primary method of video delivery has not been without drawbacks. Previous experimental studies have shown that multiple HAS players competing for network bandwidth on a bottleneck link (e.g., on the access link of a home network or an enterprise LAN), can cause two critical problems concerning the end-user perceived Quality of Experience (QoE): instability in the quality level of the playback and unfairness between different player's quality levels. Primarily, this happens because the competing HAS players often fail to determine their fair share of the bandwidth to use successfully. To this end, we propose C-HAS, a lightweight coordination scheme that dynamically determines the correct bandwidth share to be used by each player based on the network usage information coming from of all the players taken together.
In this talk, I will present the design of C-HAS and demonstrate how it can improve on state of the art by reducing the instability and unfairness problems in a significant manner.