Feedback Control for Adaptive Live Video Streaming

Multimedia content feeds an ever increasing fraction of the Internet traffic. Video streaming is one of the most important applications driving this trend. Adaptive video streaming is a relevant advancement with respect to classic progressive download streaming such as the one employed by YouTube. It consists in dynamically adapting the content bitrate in order to provide the maximum Quality of Experience, given the current available bandwidth, while ensuring a continuous reproduction. In this paper we propose a Quality Adaptation Controller (QAC) for live adaptive video streaming designed by employing feedback control theory. An experimental comparison with Akamai adaptive video streaming has been carried out. We have found the following main results: 1) QAC is able to throttle the video quality to match the available bandwidth with a transient of less than 30s while ensuring a continuous video reproduction; 2) QAC fairly shares the available bandwidth both in the cases of a concurrent TCP greedy connection or a concurrent video streaming flow; 3) Akamai underutilizes the available bandwidth due to the conservativeness of its heuristic algorithm; moreover, when abrupt available bandwidth reductions occur, the video reproduction is affected by interruptions