Title: TFDASH: A Fairness, Stability, and Efficiency Aware Rate Control Approach for Multiple Clients over DASH,
Abstract: Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) has recently been widely deployed
in the Internet and adopted in the industry. It, however, does not impose any
adaptation logic for selecting the quality of video fragments requested by
clients and suffers from lackluster performance with respect to a number of
desirable properties: efficiency, stability, and fairness when multiple players
compete for a bottleneck link. In this paper, we propose a throughput-friendly
DASH (TFDASH) rate control scheme for video streaming with multiple clients
over DASH to well balance the trade-offs among efficiency, stability, and
fairness. The core idea behind guaranteeing fairness and high efficiency
(bandwidth utilization) is to avoid OFF periods during the downloading process
for all clients, i.e., the bandwidth is in perfect-subscription or
over-subscription with bandwidth utilization approach to 100\%. We also propose
a dual-threshold buffer model to solve the instability problem caused by the
above idea. As a result, by integrating these novel components, we also propose
a probability-driven rate adaption logic taking into account several key
factors that most influence visual quality, including buffer occupancy, video
playback quality, video bit-rate switching frequency and amplitude, to
guarantee high-quality video streaming. Our experiments evidently demonstrate
the superior performance of the proposed method.