QoE-aware Download Control and Bitrate Adaptation for Short Video Streaming

Abstract

Nowadays, although the rapidly growing demand for short video sharing has brought enormous commercial value, considerable bandwidth usage becomes a problem for service providers. To save costs of service providers, the short video applications face a critical conflict between maximizing the user quality of experience (QoE) and minimizing the bandwidth usage. Most of existing bitrate adaptation methods are designed for the livecast and video-on-demand instead of short video applications. In this paper, we propose a QoE-aware adaptive download control mechanism to ensure the user QoE and save the bandwidth, which can download the appropriate video according to user retention probabilities and network conditions, and pause the download when the buffered data is enough. The extensive simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed mechanism over the other baseline methods.