Title:
SABRE: A client based technique for mitigating the buffer bloat effect of adaptive video flows
SABRE: A client based technique for mitigating the buffer bloat effect of adaptive video flows
Author(s)
Mansy, Ahmed
Ver Steeg, Bill
Ammar, Mostafa H.
Ver Steeg, Bill
Ammar, Mostafa H.
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Abstract
HTTP adaptive video streaming is an emerging technology
that aims to deliver video quality to clients in a manner that
accommodates available bandwidth and its fluctuations. In
this scheme, a video stream is split at the server into small
video files encoded at multiple bitrates. The video is composed
at the client by downloading these files over HTTP
and TCP. Although there are some efforts to standardize media
representation for this technology, adaptation techniques
remain an open area for development. Recently, an alarm
was raised by a study about the interaction between TCP
congestion control algorithms and large buffers on the Internet.
Queuing delays when these buffers are full can reach
several hundreds of milliseconds in a phenomenon that was
dubbed buffer bloat. In this paper we use measurements on
a testbed to demonstrate and quantify the buffer bloat effect
of HTTP adaptive streaming. We show that in a typical residential
setting a single video stream can easily cause queuing
delays up to one second and even more hence seriously
degrading the performance of other applications sharing the
home network. We develop SABRE (Smooth Adaptive Bit
RatE), a scheme that can be implemented by the client to
mitigate this problem. We implemented SABRE in the VLC
player. Using our testbed, we show that our technique can reduce
buffer occupancy and significantly diminish the buffer
bloat effect without affecting the experience of the video
viewer
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Date Issued
2012
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Text
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Technical Report