Performance of HTTP video streaming under different network conditions

Abstract

The Internet video sharing services have been gaining importance and increasing their share in the multimedia market. In order to compete effectively and provide broadcast television with a comparable level of quality, the Internet video should fulfil stringent quality of service (QoS) constraints. However, as the Internet video is based on packet transmission, it is influenced by delays, transmission errors, data losses and bandwidth limitations which can have a devastating influence on the perceived quality of the multimedia content. There are many works which describe the impact of network impairments on the Internet video. Nevertheless, little is known about how network conditions influence the video streamed by the currently popular services such as YouTube, where video is transmitted over reliable TCP/HTTP protocols. Therefore using a network simulator, we conducted an experimental evaluation of the HTTP based video transmission analysing how the network impairments mentioned above influence the streamed video. The experiments were validated against a network emulator supplied with real network traces. As a result of this work, we can state that the buffering strategies implemented by a video player are in many cases able to mitigate unfavourable network conditions what allow to play the streamed video smoothly. The results may serve Internet Service Providers so that they could tune their network characteristics in order to match the demand from HTTP video. © 2013 The Author(s).