Multiple description-DASH: Pragmatic video streaming maximizing end-users' quality of experience

Abstract

Over the past few years, adaptive bitrate streaming protocols, such as DASH, have risen to enhance the End-Users' experience towards video consumption over the Internet. Current methods perform a smoother playback (i.e., fewer re-buffering states) trading off with quality fluctuations due to the client-server link state. The proposed work goes a step further and introduces an innovative lightweight streaming solution by taking advantage of bandwidth aggregation over multiple paths using multiple content sources at the same time. This pragmatic evolving approach outperforms the QoE delivered by current DASH-based or P2P-based solutions and leverages the scope of action made available to the media delivery chain actors. The proposed solution has been implemented and is compared to a DASH-based approach used in most existing VoD use-cases through a first set of experiments. Results demonstrate the strong advantages in terms of quality delivered at the End-User's side and buffer occupancy. Discussion on the necessary trade-offs is also tackled.

Adding a New Dimension to HTTP Adaptive Streaming Through Multiple-Source Capabilities

“…Although most of the proposed MDC approaches [5] rely on two descriptions only, our solution can generate any number, enabling the use of an important number of servers, providing better bitrate scalability and resilience to outages and delay variations [5]. The work [11][12] also relies on the use of descriptions. However, descriptions in [ [11][12] are created prior the content consumption phase that limits network heterogeneity adaptability to the number of available descriptions, leading to many quality fluctuations.…”

“…The work [11][12] also relies on the use of descriptions. However, descriptions in [ [11][12] are created prior the content consumption phase that limits network heterogeneity adaptability to the number of available descriptions, leading to many quality fluctuations. Moreover, description placement in a distributed system is an obvious issue of [11][12], requiring expanded storage capacity.…”

“…However, descriptions in [ [11][12] are created prior the content consumption phase that limits network heterogeneity adaptability to the number of available descriptions, leading to many quality fluctuations. Moreover, description placement in a distributed system is an obvious issue of [11][12], requiring expanded storage capacity. In our work, descriptions are generated for each video segment, during consumption phase, and upon client specification.…”

Efficient Media Streaming with Collaborative Terminals for the Smart City Environment

“…Therefore, we propose to use a solution provided at the streaming protocol level and called Multiple Description-Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MD-DASH) [9][10]. This protocol is based on well-known Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTTP (DASH), an adaptive multiple HTTP-requests streaming protocol that quickly reaches the majority position in the market thanks to the fact that it is an open standard.…”

“…The solution presented in [9][10] (MD-DASH) makes multi-path streaming feasible at the HTTP level (each HTTP request is served through a different path), avoiding operations at the packet level. Moreover, MD-DASH is easily implementable in current applications (since only the adaptation protocol library should be extended) and does not require excessive overhead.…”