Enriching HTTP adaptive streaming with context awareness: A tunnel case study

Video streaming provided by Over-The-Top (OTT) service providers through a cellular network is a common usage scenario for many people today. While video streaming will work reasonably well in a stationary scenario, several issues arise for mobile users. For instance, travelling through short areas without cellular coverage, such as an automobile tunnel, will often result in quality degradation or video stalling. To combat this, this paper provides an analytical investigation of the video quality degradation problem as it is experienced by mobile users and suggests a context-aware HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) strategy to prevent stalling and minimize the impact on Quality of Experience (QoE). This provides a solution that can completely prevent stalling when appropriate context information (such as positional information from satellite navigation) is present. The collected evaluation results encourage further research on how context-awareness can be exploited to further enhance video service provisioning by OTT service providers.