Game of streaming players: Is consensus viable or an illusion?

Abstract

The dramatic growth of HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) traffic represents a practical challenge for service providers in satisfying the demand from their customers. Achieving this in a network where multiple players share the network capacity has so far proved hard because of the bandwidth competition among the HAS players. This competition is exacerbated by the bandwidth overestimation that is introduced due to the isolated and selfish behavior of the HAS players. Each player strives individually to select the maximum bitrate without considering the co-existing players or network resource dynamics. As a result, the HAS players suffer from video quality instability, quality unfairness, and network underutilization or oversubscription, and the players observe a poor quality of experience (QoE). To address this issue, we propose a fully distributed game theory and consensus-based collaborative adaptive bitrate solution for shared network environments, termed Game Theory and consensus-based Approach for Cooperative HAS delivery systems (GTAC). Our solution consists of two-stage games that run in parallel during a streaming session. We extensively evaluate GTAC on a broad set of trace-driven and real-world experiments. Results show that GTAC enhances the viewer QoE by up to 22%, presentation quality stability by up to 24%, fairness by at least 31%, and network utilization by 28% compared to the well-known schemes.