Low latency DASH based streaming over LTE

Abstract

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is becoming the de facto technique for video delivery, especially for VoD services. Although 3GPP has specified carriage of DASH over eMBMS for Live Streaming, eMBMS is not available everywhere (operators are starting service rollout) and it is only worthwhile for reasonably large number of users due to the static SFN resource allocation for those services. Thus, Live Streaming using DASH over unicast connections is still necessary, which may suffer from playback interruptions when the throughput varies since the low end-to-end latency for live streaming requires small buffers. In order to cope with network throughput variations in mobile networks, we propose the usage of scalable video coding, combining it with parallel TCP connections and prioritizing the most important data of the scalable video. We show that using LTE non-GBR bearers for prioritization playback interruptions can be avoided.