Adaptive and High-Quality Multimedia Streaming

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Multimedia streaming in all forms (including YouTube and Netflix) constitutes 58.6% of peak Internet traffic in North America. In addition to the soaring demand, the heterogeneous and fluctuating network condition, due to different connection types (e.g., WiFi, wired LAN, and cellular), and diverse hardware specifications on end-user devices challenge multimedia streaming services to be more adaptive. Though there are solutions, such as Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), to meet the increasing demand and to make multimedia streaming services more adaptive, none of them fully utilizes all available network resources to deliver the video in the best possible quality. For example, even if the available bandwidth from a service provider to an end-user device is 400 Kbps, sufficient to serve a video better than the standard definition quality (at 192 Kpbs bitrate), only standard definition video will be delivered since there is no intermediate quality level between standard definition and high definition (at 2 Mbps bitrate). It is challenging to provide a continuous video quality selection scheme since transcoding (for each quality level) is a time consuming and CPU intensive process. It is also challenging to select the appropriate quality level subject to the dynamic network condition.