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Performance evaluation of TcpHas: TCP for HTTP adaptive streaming

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Abstract

HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is a widely used video streaming technology that suffers from a degradation of user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) and network’s Quality of Service (QoS) when many HAS players are sharing the same bottleneck link and competing for bandwidth. The two major factors of this degradation are: the large OFF period of HAS, which causes false bandwidth estimations, and the TCP congestion control, which is not suitable for HAS given that it does not consider the different video encoding bitrates of HAS. This paper proposes a HAS-based TCP congestion control, TcpHas, that minimizes the impact of the two aforementioned issues. It does this using traffic shaping on the server. Simulations indicate that TcpHas improves both QoE, mainly by reducing instability and convergence speed, and QoS, mainly by reducing queuing delay and packet drop rate.

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Author notes

  1. Chiheb Ben Ameur

    Present address: INNES, ZAC Atalante Champeaux, 5A rue Pierre Joseph Colin, 35000, Rennes, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Orange Labs, 4 rue du Clos Courtel, 35510, Cesson Sévigné, France

    Emmanuel Mory

  2. IRISA, University of Rennes 1, 263 av. Général Leclerc, 35000, Rennes, France

    Bernard Cousin

  3. FEMTO-ST Institute, Numérica, cours Leprince-Ringuet, 25200, Montbéliard, France

    Eugen Dedu

Authors
  1. Chiheb Ben Ameur
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  2. Emmanuel Mory
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  3. Bernard Cousin
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  4. Eugen Dedu
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Correspondence to Emmanuel Mory.

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Ben Ameur, C., Mory, E., Cousin, B. et al. Performance evaluation of TcpHas: TCP for HTTP adaptive streaming. Multimedia Systems 24, 491–508 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-018-0587-8

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