A Joint Bitrate and Buffer Control Scheme for Low-Latency Live Streaming

Abstract

Live video streaming has experienced explosive growth on the mobile Internet. Unlike on-demand streaming, live video streaming faces more challenges due to the strong requirement of low latency. To balance several inherently conflicting performance metrics and improve the overall quality of experience (QoE), the adaptive bitrate algorithm is widely used under time-varying network conditions. However, it does not perform well at low latency. In this paper, we present a joint bitrate and buffer control scheme (JBBC) for low-latency live streaming based on latency-constrained bitrate adaptation and playback rate adaptation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has better performance on overall QoE than most existing adaptive schemes, achieving a more stable bitrate selection and relatively lower delay on the premise of almost no rebuffering.