Improving QoE of ABR Streaming Sessions through QUIC Retransmissions

Abstract

While adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming has contributed significantly to the reduction of video playout stalling, ABR clients continue to suffer from the variation of bit rate qualities over the duration of a streaming session. Similar to stalling, these variations in bit rate quality have a negative impact on the users' Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper, we use a trace from a large-scale CDN to show that such quality changes occur in a significant amount of streaming sessions and investigate an ABR video segment retransmission approach to reduce the number of such quality changes. As the new HTTP/2 standard is becoming increasingly popular, we also see an increase in the usage of QUIC as an alternative protocol for the transmission of web traffic including video streaming. Using various network conditions, we conduct a systematic comparison of existing transport layer approaches for HTTP/2 that is best suited for ABR segment retransmissions. Since it is well known that both protocols provide a series of improvements over HTTP/1.1, we perform experiments both in controlled environments and over transcontinental links in the Internet and find that these benefits also "trickle up'' into the application layer when it comes to ABR video streaming where QUIC retransmissions can significantly improve the average quality bitrate while simultaneously minimizing bit rate variations over the duration of a streaming session.