Bandwidth estimation and rate adaptation in HTTP streaming

HTTP Streaming is one type of video streaming technology, delivering multimedia data using HTTP/TCP. Due to the strict boundaries between layers of the OSI communication model, HTTP Streaming client at the Application Layer can only see the bandwidth that TCP at the Transport Layer supplies. How to estimate the upcoming bandwidth in the future according to the bandwidth history HTTP Streaming client has seen is the first problem this paper wants to address. Since the network bandwidth represents the data producing rate for the media player at the client and the media bitrate represents the data consuming rate of the media player, the quality of user experience of HTTP Streaming would be at a low level, if there is mismatch between the network bandwidth and the media bitrate. How to make rate adaptation for HTTP Streaming system based on the bandwidth estimation results is the second problem this paper wants to address. From the experimental results, we can see our bandwidth estimation and rate adaptation algorithm proposed to tackle the above two problems can provide a better enhancement for the prevalent HTTP Streaming system, comparing with the rate adaptation algorithm using common throughput smoothing strategy.