QoE maximizing bitrate control for live video streaming on a mobile uplink

Abstract

Video streaming is now one of the main applications on mobile networks. Since the throughput fluctuates widely on a mobile network, adaptive bitrate control methods that control the video bitrate in accordance with this fluctuation have been developed. These methods decide the bitrate at a one-second or a few-second interval. In most of these methods, the output of a decision is a bitrate value, and the decided bitrate continues until the next decision. This paper models the behavior of video packets on a mobile uplink and proposes a novel bitrate control method. In the method, the output of a decision is the bitrate change over time for several seconds into the future, not a bitrate value, that maximizes an integrated value of the quality of experience (QoE) indicator for the model of behavior. This paper compares the proposed method with conventional methods by simulation. The proposed method improved the mean opinion score (MOS), which indicates the estimated QoE as a value between 1 and 5, by up to 0.2.