Collaborative Methods To Reduce The Disastrous Effects Of The Overlapping ON Problem In DASH

The performance of today's adaptive video streaming players (DASH) is severely hindered by overlapping ON-OFF patterns that occurs during a streaming session. High switching rates, freezing and skipping annoy users resulting in poor user-QoE. This paper attempts to overcome the ON-OFF problem by keeping players aware of each other's downloads and inter-request times. Using this a player is able to better predict future player actions and reschedule their downloads to produce least conflicts with others. If a player's start segment download overlaps with the end of one or more players' current downloads within a certain time t1 it waits until the download of others completes before starting its own download. Conversely if too many players are sharing the bottleneck link a player will hold of its download by a time t2 enabling others to move towards completion of their downloads. This reduces the overlap of its download with other players. Both these methods help reduce competition at the bottleneck and produces a more balanced sharing of network resources.