MPEG-DASH over IDVB-T: The QoE unfairness issue

Abstract

MPEG-DASH is the first international standardisation effort in the area of HTTP Adaptive Streaming, but as its vendor counterparts suffers from the QoE unfairness issue: alike MPEG-DASH users, sharing the same net and requesting the same video service, receive segments from different Quality Profiles. Being interested to exploit MPEG-DASH paradigm for transferring video services over interactive digital broadcasting networks, we discuss, in this paper, how these broadcasting networks can provide QoE fairness to their MPEG-DASH users. In more detail, we propose the elevation of the broadcasting networks' edge routers to QoE fairness nodes able to enforce any QoE fairness policy to their MPEG-DASH users. Towards validating our approach, we integrated in each edge router a Traffic Shaper, to be used as a QoE fairness module, and run several experiments that verified the QoE unfairness issue, besides revealing ours solution capacity to eliminate it.