Parallel Adaptive HTTP Media Streaming

Recent advances in adaptive HTTP streaming of 3GPP have paved the way to the development of media streaming over HTTP. The traditional HTTP streaming relies on a series of request segments and receive segments sequentially. In the current Internet media segments can be delivered through distributed networks. In such a scenario, the traditional series request-receive based adaptive HTTP streaming method is, however, unable to provide optimum streaming since the distributed networks resources are not fully utilized. In this paper, we present a novel parallel adaptive HTTP streaming method. Compared to the traditional series of adaptive HTTP streaming technique, our method a) enables the receiver to request multiple segments in parallel b) provides a solution to maintains a limited number of HTTP sessions for receiving segments in parallel and to determine when to start a new HTTP session to request the next segment c) can adapt media bitrates while receiving previously requested segments. Simulation results show that the proposed parallel adaptive HTTP streaming method outperforms the traditional series of adaptive HTTP streaming with respect to providing a higher playback media quality and decreasing the interruption frequency of media playing.