TASQ: Temporal Adaptive Streaming over QUIC

Abstract

Traditional Adaptive BitRate (ABR) streaming faces a challenge of providing smooth experience under highly variable network conditions, especially when low latency is required. Effective adaptation techniques exist for deep-buffer scenarios, such as streaming long-form Video-on-Demand content, but remain elusive for short-form or low-latency cases, when even a short segment may be delivered too late and cause a stall. Recently proposed temporal adaptation aims to mitigate this problem by being robust to losing a part of the video segment, essentially dropping the tail of the segment intentionally to avoid the stall. In this paper, we analyze this approach in the context of a recently adopted codec AV1 and find that it does not always provide the promised benefits. We investigate the root causes and find that a combination of codec efficiency and TCP behavior can defeat the benefits of temporal adaptation. We develop a solution based on QUIC, and present the results showing that the benefits of temporal adaptation that still apply to AV1, including reduced stall time up to 65% compared to the original TCP-based approach. In addition, we present a novel way to use the stream management features of QUIC to benefit Quality-of-Experience (QoE) and reduce wasted data in video streaming.