HTTP/2-Based Adaptive Streaming of HEVC Video Over 4G/LTE Networks

Jeroen van der Hooft, Stefano Petrangeli, Tim Wauters, Rafael Huysegems, Patrice Rondao Alface, Tom Bostoen, Filip De Turck
2016 IEEE Communications Letters  
In HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), video content is temporally divided into multiple segments, each encoded at several quality levels. The client can adapt the requested video quality to network changes, generally resulting in a smoother playback. Unfortunately, live streaming solutions still often suffer from playout freezes and a large end-to-end delay. By reducing the segment duration, the client can use a smaller temporal buffer and respond even faster to network changes. However, since
more » ... nts are requested subsequently, this approach is susceptible to high round-trip times. In this letter, we discuss the merits of an HTTP/2 push-based approach. We present the details of a measurement study on the available bandwidth in real 4G/LTE networks, and analyze the induced bit rate overhead for HEVCencoded video segments with a sub-second duration. Through an extensive evaluation with the generated video content, we show that the proposed approach results in a higher video quality (+7.5%) and a lower freeze time (-50.4%), and allows to reduce the live delay compared to traditional solutions over HTTP/1.1.
doi:10.1109/lcomm.2016.2601087 fatcat:4bovhgqrdvebtphxd45ht4f7nq