EAAT: Environment-Aware Adaptive Transmission for Split-Screen Video Streaming

With the tremendous growth of video contents and mobility demands, there is a need to develop more personalized video services. Split-screen services, such as picture in picture become more and more popular. Furthermore, the user's viewing environment affects the user's quality of experience (QoE). Therefore, video transmission of split-screen services face several major challenges, such as to quantify the impact of environmental factors on user's QoE; how to assess the user's QoE of the split-screen services; how to choose the bit-rate of each video stream to maximize user's QoE of the split-screen services. To address these challenges, in the paper, an environment-aware adaptive transmission (EAAT) scheme for split-screen video streaming is first presented. Then, we introduce a mathematical model for characterizing user's QoE to be affected by environmental factors in the proposed EAAT. In the model, the QoE of user's relationship with the viewing environment is proposed. Based on the model, a problem of maximizing user's QoE is formulated, and we develop a heuristic algorithm to solve the optimization problem. In addition, we conduct various trace-bandwidth experiments to rigorously evaluate the proposed EAAT scheme in different network environments, and show that EAAT can enrich the video quality while saving network resources.