HTTP adaptive streaming scheme for improving the quality of experience in multi-server environments

Many studies have been conducted on multi-server HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS). The existing schemes can highly utilize the available bandwidth by aggregating the multipath bandwidth and improve the video quality by switching servers when network congestion occurs. However, these existing schemes have problems that adversely affect the Quality of Experience (QoE) in a multi-server environment. To cope with these problems, we analyze the existing HAS schemes in multi-server environments. Through simulation-based performance analysis, we prove that these existing schemes lead to playback stalling and frequent quality changes. Based on the analysis, we propose a new HAS scheme for multi-server environments. The proposed scheme improves the QoE by alleviating the problems of the existing schemes. Through the simulation results, we prove that the proposed scheme alleviates the shortcomings of the existing schemes and improves QoE metrics compared with the existing multi-server schemes.