Pipeline-Based Chunk Scheduling to Improve ABR Performance in DASH System

To deliver high quality video across different network conditions, the video chunks are explicitly fetched by client or proactively pushed by server in Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) system. Unfortunately, on the one hand, the client fetch mechanism suffers from bandwidth wastage due to its stop-and-wait fashion when the network delay becomes large. On the other hand, the server push mechanism performs poorly because of its inflexibility in bitrate switching under fluctuating bandwidth. To address these inefficiencies, we propose a pipeline-based chunk scheduling scheme called PCS to auto-turn the sending time of each chunk. For a given ABR algorithm, PCS dynamically pre-schedules the chunk delivery according to the real-time network conditions. Using the pipelined-based chunk delivery, PCS flexibly adjusts the bitrate of each chunk and meanwhile avoids the unnecessary waiting time in the stop-and-wait transmission. The experimental results of testbed implementations show that PCS greatly improves the average bitrate of the state-of-the-art ABR algorithms by up to 26%, and reduces the rebuffer rate by up to 31%.