The value of context-awareness in bandwidth-challenging HTTP adaptive streaming scenarios

Abstract

Video streaming has become an indispensable technology in people’s lives, while its usage keeps constantly increasing. The variability, instability and unpredictability of network conditions pose one of the biggest challenges to video streaming. In this chapter, we analyze HTTP Adaptive Streaming, a technology that relieves these issues by adapting the video reproduction to the current network conditions. Particularly, we study how context awareness can be combined with the adaptive streaming logic to design a proactive client-based video streaming strategy. Our results show that such a context-aware strategy manages to successfully mitigate stallings in light of network connectivity problems, such as an outage. Moreover, we analyze the performance of this strategy by comparing it to the optimal case, as well as by considering situations where the awareness of the context lacks reliability.