On the Bitrate Adaptation of Shared Media Experience Services

Abstract

In Shared Media Experience Services (SMESs), a group of people is interested in streaming consumption in a synchronised way, like in the case of cloud gaming, live streaming, and interactive social applications. However, group synchronisation comes at the expense of other Quality of Experience (QoE) factors due to both the dynamic and diverse network conditions that each group member experiences. Someone might wonder if there is a way to keep a group synchronised while maintaining the highest possible QoE for each one of its members. In this work, at first we create a Quality Assessment Framework capable of evaluating different SMESs improvement approaches with respect to traditional metrics like media bitrate quality, playback disruption, and end user desynchronisation. Secondly, we focus on the bitrate adaptation for improving the QoE of SMESs, as an incrementally deployable end user triggered approach, and we formulate the problem in the context of Adaptive Real Time Dynamic Programming (ARTDP). Finally, we develop and apply a simple QoE aware bitrate adaptation mechanism that we compare against youtube live-streaming traces to find that it improves the youtube performance by more than 30%.