Bandwidth and buffer-based (B2)-dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP

Abstract

Today, video streaming technology is widely used for entertainment, commercials, social networks and so on. In the past, UDP protocol was used to transfer streaming video but sometimes networks blocked this protocol which made video streaming unplayable. Dynamic Streaming over HTTP has been proposed to use the HTTP protocol instead. Many researchers have proposed algorithms to enhance the performance of DASH with 2 main approaches, bandwidth-based and buffer-based. Both approaches have pros and cons. In this work, a B2-DASH algorithm is proposed to use both bandwidth and buffer-based approaches. The algorithm was implemented and tested in 2 scenarios in ns-3 network simulator. The performance metrics were the average video bitrate, number of resolution changes and number of interruptions. The B2-DASH compared with the FDASH algorithm and results showed that B2-DASH outperformed FDASH for both the average bitrate and number of resolution changed.