Equitable quality video streaming

Video streaming has frequently been deployed using constant bit rate video encoding and transmission as these are easily implemented and network provisioning, although requiring admission control, is straightforward. However, it is sub-optimal for both the user, who experiences time varying quality, and the network operator, who can not fully utilize the network during periods of low usage and is faced with admission control and session refusal at busy times. Instead we propose an equitable quality scheme in which the available network bandwidth is divided between the concurrent sessions so that the same quality is delivered in each. We show that we can increase average quality (Mean Opinion Score) by 0.74, or alternatively increase the number of sessions that can be supported at the same average overall quality by 80%.