Reinforcement learning - based adaptation and scheduling methods for multi-source DASH

Abstract

Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) has been widely used in video streaming recently. In DASH, the client downloads video chunks in order from a server. The rate adaptation function at the video client enhances the user?s quality-of-experience (QoE) by choosing a suitable quality level for each video chunk to download based on the network condition. Today networks such as content delivery networks, edge caching networks, content centric networks, etc. usually replicate video contents on multiple cache nodes. We study video streaming from multiple sources in this work. In multi-source streaming, video chunks may arrive out of order due to different conditions of the network paths. Hence, to guarantee a high QoE, the video client needs not only rate adaptation, but also chunk scheduling. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the state-of-the-art control method in various fields in recent years. This paper proposes two algorithms for streaming from multiple sources: RL-based adaptation with greedy scheduling (RLAGS) and RL-based adaptation and scheduling (RLAS). We also build a simulation environment for training and evaluation. The efficiency of the proposed algorithms is proved via extensive simulations with real-trace data.