Name and tittle: Dr. Saad Harous, Associate Prof. Project

Title: Improving End-user Quality of Experience in Adaptive Video Streaming over HTTP (HAS)

Project Abstract:

HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is being adopted with increasing frequency and becoming the de-facto standard for video streaming. However, the client-driven, on-off adaptation behavior of HAS results in uneven bandwidth competition. This issue is exacerbated when a large number of clients share the same bottleneck network link and compete for the available bandwidth. With HAS each client independently strives to maximize its individual share of the available bandwidth, which leads to bandwidth competition and a decrease in end-user quality of experience (QoE).

The competition causes scalability issues: quality instability, unfair bandwidth sharing and network resource under-utilization. These issues may lead the client to give up the service or join another service operator. Video streaming is a major Internet traffic source and it has been estimated that in 2016 more than 66% of Internet traffic was video and by 2018 video transmissions will reach approximately 80% of the total Internet traffic.

The main purpose of this project is a designed solution to avoid these issues. Our aim is to help content providers and network operators to maintain QoE at a high satisfactory level, leading to increase in their business.