A Hybrid Control Scheme for Adaptive Live Streaming

TL;DR

This paper introduces HYSA, a hybrid control scheme for adaptive live streaming that combines bitrate, latency, and frame dropping controls to enhance user experience under variable network conditions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hybrid control scheme, HYSA, integrating heuristic playback rate, latency-constrained bitrate, and QoE-oriented frame dropping for improved live streaming.

Findings

HYSA outperforms existing schemes in QoE metrics

Utilizes KAMA for accurate bitrate prediction

Effective balancing of latency, quality, and jitter

Abstract

The live streaming is more challenging than on-demand streaming, because the low latency is also a strong requirement in addition to the trade-off between video quality and jitters in playback. To balance several inherently conflicting performance metrics and improve the overall quality of experience (QoE), many adaptation schemes have been proposed. Bitrate adaptation is one of the major solutions for video streaming under time-varying network conditions, which works even better combining with some latency control methods, such as adaptive playback rate control and frame dropping. However, it still remains a challenging problem to design an algorithm to combine these adaptation schemes together. To tackle this problem, we propose a hybrid control scheme for adaptive live streaming, namely HYSA, based on heuristic playback rate control, latency-constrained bitrate control and QoE-oriented adaptive frame dropping. The proposed scheme utilizes Kaufman's Adaptive Moving Average (KAMA) to predict segment bitrates for better rate decisions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that HYSA outperforms most of the existing adaptation schemes on overall QoE.