A framework for network assisted HTTP ABR Video Streaming in LTE-WLAN networks

HTTP ABR Video Streaming based methods are being used by certain media players and video servers. With this, video is encoded with different data rates, stored on a content server (if possible) and streamed to different client devices. Media player at client device considers various performance factors and decides the rate that it should ask for the next video segment. There are different types of media players being developed and used by client devices. There are scenarios where a media player for a specific technology is being developed by different software organizations or developers for certain browser and operating system. Some of these use different types of methods at client device for deciding data rate for next HTTP video segment. There could also be misbehaving client devices that could act in greedy way and ask for unfair share of resources. It is desirable for network provider to have ways to influence client behavior in such systems. We propose a framework for network assisted HTTP ABR streaming in this paper. We collect and compute certain performance statistics and provide those to client devices. We call this, Quality of Resource (QoR), metric and we also provide a hint for data rate that client device should consider while requesting for next HTTP video segment. We also provide a method to incentivize cooperating users.