An MPQUIC-Based Frame-Granularity Transmission Mechanism for Adaptive Video Streaming

Nowadays, watching online video streaming through mobile devices is becoming increasingly popular. It is essential to provide users with a satisfying video-watching experience. Multipath QUIC(MPQUIC), an emerging multipath transport protocol, is considered to have great potential in Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP(DASH). However, we found that existing segment-granularity video streaming transmission in the DASH scenario has a large amount of rebuffering events of short duration. These short-lived rebuffering events seriously impact the user's Quality of Experience(QoE). We found that network fluctuation is the root cause. However, network fluctuation cannot be avoided or predicted. An MPQUIC-based frame-granularity transmission mechanism(MQ-FGTM) is proposed to solve this problem. The frame-granularity transmission avoids the re-buffering events caused by the traditional segment-granularity transmission mechanism that each segment must be downloaded completely before playback. To correctly decode video frames on the client side, we build the stream dependency tree on the server side and construct Minimum Scheduling Groups(MSGs) based on streaming decoding characteristics. Then, we propose a frame-aware scheduler to schedule the MSG in decoding order. Experiments show that MQ-FGTM can reduce the rebuffering number by 68.4%, the rebuffering time by 45.75%, and improve the overall QoE by 21.97%.