Improving Adaptive Video Streaming through Session Classification

Abstract

With internet video gaining increasing popularity and soaring to dominate network traffic, extensive studies are being carried out on how to achieve higher Quality of Experience (QoE) with the delivery of video content. Associated with the chunk-based streaming protocol, Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) algorithms have recently emerged to cope with the diverse and fluctuating network conditions by dynamically adjusting bitrates for future chunks. This inevitably involves predicting the future throughput of a video session. Some of the session features like Internet Service Provider (ISP), geographical location, and so on, could affect network conditions and contain helpful information for this throughput prediction. In this article, we consider how our knowledge about the session features can be utilized to improve ABR quality via customized parameter settings. We present our ABR-independent, QoE-driven, feature-based partition method to classify the logged video sessions so that different parameter settings could be adopted in different situations to reach better quality. A variation of Decision Tree is developed for the classification and has been applied to a sample ABR for evaluation. The experiment shows that our approach can improve the average bitrate of the sample ABR by 36.1% without causing the increase of the rebuffering ratio where 99% of the sessions can get improvement. It can also improve the rebuffering ratio by 87.7% without causing the decrease of the average bitrate, where, among those sessions involved in rebuffering, 82% receives improvement and 18% remains the same.