What happens when adaptive video streaming players compete in time-varying bandwidth conditions?

Competition among adaptive video streaming players severely diminishes user-QoE. When players compete at a bottleneck link many do not obtain adequate resources. This imbalance eventually causes ill effects such as screen flickering and video stalling. There have been many attempts in recent years to overcome some of these problems. However, added to the competition at the bottleneck link there is also the possibility of varying network bandwidth which can make the situation even worse. This work focuses on such a situation. It evaluates current heuristic adaptive video players at a bottleneck link with time-varying bandwidth conditions. Experimental setup includes the TAPAS player and emulated network conditions. The results show PANDA outperforms FESTIVE, ELASTIC and the Conventional players.