Impact of Prioritized HTTP/3 Transport on Low-Latency Live Streaming

Timely delivery is central to low-latency live streaming. In November 2023, the Internet-Draft for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) added support for HTTP/3 (H3) and required the use of RFC 9218 (extensible priority scheme) with H3 servers delivering low-latency HLS (LL-HLS) content. The Internet-Draft further mandated several prioritization rules on the playlists, media segments and variant streams. This work is the first experimental study in this domain, with a focus on demonstrating the effectiveness of these rules and evaluating whether RFC 9218 emerges as a viable solution for optimizing low-latency live streaming experiences.