Adaptive bitrate streaming protocols, such as DASH, have seen extensive interest for their trade-off between smooth playbacks and quality fluctuations, aiming at increasing end-users' satisfaction toward video consumption over the Internet. The proposed work goes a step further and offers multiple-server support to Over-The-Top dynamic adaptive streaming applications: Multiple-Description DASH. This innovative lightweight streaming protocol takes advantage of bandwidth from multiple links by simultaneously retrieving video segments from several sources in different locations. Thanks to its codec agnosticism, DASH-compliance, and receiver-driven philosophy, our work presents a pragmatic and evolving solution that has been implemented and tested over the Internet. While Multiple-Description DASH comes at the cost of a tunable bandwidth consumption overhead, preliminary results demonstrate the strong QoE advantages against a standard DASH solution in terms of content quality and buffer occupancy on end-user side.
['Joachim Bruneau-Queyreix', 'Mathias Lacaud', 'Petros Anapliotis', 'Daniel Negru']
On providing multiple-server support to dynamic adaptive streaming applications for enhanced QoE