Inter-Stream Adaptive Bitrate Streaming for Short-Video Services

Abstract

Short-video services have seen explosive growth in recent years. Streaming over mobile networks is inherently challenging due to the latter's bandwidth fluctuations, motivating researchers to develop many sophisticated adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms to compensate. While ABR, together with prefetching, has been proposed for playlist streaming, its application to non-playlist streaming has received little attention. This work fills this gap by first exploring the efficacy of directly applying ABR to non-playlist streaming. Observing their limitations motivates the development of a new class of inter-stream bitrate adaptation (ISA) algorithms. Unlike ABR, ISA adapts bitrate on a per-video basis, which is not only simpler to implement and deploy but can even outperform ABR algorithms by up to 66.71% across a wide range of networks. Moreover, ISA and ABR are complementary such that they can be combined into Integrated Bitrate Adaptation (IBA) algorithms to raise performance gains further by up to 77.03%. In addition, this work develops a novel adaptive rebuffering duration (ARD) algorithm specifically designed for frame-based playback common in short-video services to further improve their performance under challenging network conditions. Together, ISA and ARD offer a new set of tools with progressive complexity-performance tradeoffs for enhancing the performance of short-video services.