Dynamic adaptation for video streaming over mobile devices. (c2013)

Abstract

Mobile video is expected to generate over 66% of mobile data traffic by 2017. The quality of experience, however, can be frustrating due to wireless channel variations that lead to bandwidth fluctuation. Moreover, different kinds of video players, plugins, and network protocols may be required at the client side to run a given video. As a result, MPEG with the participation of many industries developed the MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) in order to standardize video streaming over HTTP. MPEG-DASH aims at enhancing the user’s quality of streaming experience by dynamically switching between different video encodings depending on the underlying network conditions. The MPEG-DASH standard was published as ISO/IEC 23009-1:2012 in April, 2012. The ISO standard, however, does not provide a normative definition of a DASH client nor identify a specific adaptation algorithm to be used by the client. As a result, several MPEGDASH implementations with different adaptation methodologies have been proposed in the literature. In this thesis, a new MPEG-DASH dynamic adaptation algorithm for mobile devices is proposed to provide enhanced quality of experience. A comparative study between the proposed adaptation approach and existing MPEGDASH implementations is presented. The study is based on experiments conducted under different network simulations and results show that the proposed approach ensures a stepwise transition between different video encodings that is consistent with the varying network throughput and client conditions.