Adaptive Bitrate Streaming Over Cellular Networks: Rate Adaptation and Data Savings Strategies

Abstract

Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) has become the de facto technique for video streaming over the Internet. Despite a flurry of techniques, achieving high quality ABR streaming over cellular networks remains a tremendous challenge. First, the design of an ABR scheme needs to balance conflicting Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics such as video quality, quality changes, stalls and startup performance, which is even harder under highly dynamic bandwidth in cellular network. Second, streaming providers have been moving towards using Variable Bitrate (VBR) encodings for the video content, which introduces new challenges for ABR streaming, whose nature and implications are little understood. Third, mobile video streaming consumes a lot of data. Although many video and network providers currently offer data saving options, the existing practices are suboptimal in QoE and resource usage. Last, when the audio and video tracks are stored separately, video and audio rate adaptation needs to be dynamically coordinated to achieve good overall streaming experience, which presents interesting challenges while, somewhat surprisingly, has received little attention by the research community. In this dissertation, we tackle each of the above four challenges.Firstly, we design a framework called PIA (PID-control based ABR streaming) that strategically leverages PID control concepts and novel approaches to account for the various requirements of ABR streaming. The evaluation results demonstrate that