Stepwise Adaptive Video Streaming in the Wireless Mobile Network Using the Temporal-Geo Bandwidth Estimation Method

Abstract

With the advance of wireless mobile communication technologies, video streaming has advanced much more on these years. However, the wireless mobile network usually suffers fluctuation in available bandwidth because mobile users usually keep moving and playing streaming video simultaneously. To overcome the situation, this work proposed a method called Stepwise Adaptive Streaming using Temporal-Geo Bandwidth Estimation (SASTGBE) for the wireless mobile networking environment based on MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH). To have better Quality Of Experience (QoE), e.g., no or fewer quality switching, lower bitrate difference between two continuous video segments, no or fewer suspended times, no or shorter paused time, etc., (1) the proposed method considers location, time, and date for estimating the available bandwidth in the future and (2) the proposed stepwise adaptive streaming control scheme considers buffer level, video quality of the most recently downloaded segment, the downloading rate of the most recently downloaded segment and the estimated bandwidth to decide the video quality for the next downloaded segment. The proposed method has been implemented in the Android system for the client side and the Linux system for the server side. The experiments using SASTGBE in the real environment shown that SASTGBE has improvement in the performance of bandwidth utilization, suspended times, quality switch percentage, average bitrate difference considering suspending, and standard deviation of bitrate difference over the wireless mobile network.