FRAB: A Flexible Relaxation Method for Fair, Stable, Efficient Multi-user DASH Video Streaming

Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) has been widely adopted in modern video streaming services. In DASH, the core technique is adaptive bitrate (ABR) control which can adjust the requested video bitrate level according to the network conditions to tradeoff between video quality and rebuffering risk. It is a challenge for the ABR methods in the scenarios when multiple DASH streaming users compete over the network bottleneck. This paper proposes a client-side ABR control method, flexible relaxation assisted by buffer (FRAB), to achieve fair, stable and efficient video streaming among different users. The idea of FRAB is to "relax" the change of the video quality based on current buffer level, which can enhance the stability of video streaming. Meanwhile, by flexibly adjusting the relaxation, the efficiency and fairness among all users are improved. FRAB is evaluated in real experiments under three different network conditions and compared with conventional multi-user ABR algorithms. Results indicate FRAB has the best performance in fairness, which reduces the unfairness by a maximum of 69.5% under real-world measured network condition. It also improves the efficiency by 71.3% comparing with PANDA, and enhances the stability by 73.3% comparing with TFDASH. The experiment results demonstrated that the proposed method has superior performances in multi-user DASH video streaming.