Efficient Bandwidth Estimation for HTTP Adaptive Streaming

As the multimedia devices are becoming more diverse and the HTTP adaptive streaming techniques grow in popularity, the transmission of adequate video quality becomes increasingly important. HTTP adaptive streaming requires accurate information about available bandwidth of client for quality adaptation. Accurate estimation of available bandwidth is difficult, as a suitable approach must address three challenges. First, it must be accurate enough to make decisions about the admission of high-throughput high-quality streams. Second, it must be fast enough to determine the video quality. Last, it should be non-intrusive to streaming traffic. In this paper we propose a new bandwidth estimation scheme, called an Efficient Bandwidth Estimation (EBE), for HTTP adaptive streaming. To provide information which is needed to determine the representation level of HTTP adaptive streaming, the EBE scheme uses the difference between the bitrate of representation levels. We show that our approach is accurate, fast, and non-intrusive compared with other schemes.