Dynamic threshold based rate adaptation for HTTP live streaming

The Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is specified to cope with the changing network conditions and provide an adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution. While there have been many researches of rate adaptation algorithms on adaptive HTTP streaming, much of the work is focused on Video on Demand (VoD) service - which is not same as live streaming. It is generally preferred to minimize the end-to-end delay and make full use of the bandwidth for live services. In this paper, we propose a buffer-based rate adaptation algorithm with dynamic threshold which can decrease the rate transitions and provide a seamless playback under a low latency requirement. The rate adaptation metrics not only take into account the momentary value of bandwidth but also consider its fluctuation as the recognition of bandwidth is crucial over small buffer. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed rate adaptation scheme outperforms the methods using fixed threshold or instant throughput.