• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.11
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• pp.4519-4533
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• 2015

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) adaptive streaming has become a new trend in video delivery. An HTTP adaptive streaming client needs to effectively estimate resource availability and demand. However, due to the bitrate of the video encoded in variable bitrate (VBR) mode, a bitrate mismatch problem occurs. With the rising demand for mobile devices, the likelihood of cases where two or more HTTP adaptive streaming clients share the same network bottleneck and competing for available bandwidth will increase. These mismatch and competition issues lead to network congestion, which adversely affects the Quality of Experience (QoE). To solve these problem, we propose a video rate adaptation scheme for the HTTP video streaming to guarantee and optimize the QoE. The proposed scheme estimates the available bandwidth according to the bitrate of each segment and also schedules the segment request time to expedite the response to the bandwidth variation. We used a multi-client simulation to prove that our scheme can effectively cope with drastic changes in the connection throughput and video bitrate.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.27-34
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• 2013

This paper proposes a network-adaptive mechanism for HTTP-based video streaming over wireless/mobile networks. To provide adaptive video streaming over wireless/mobile networks, the proposed mechanism consists of a throughput estimation scheme in the time-variant wireless network environment and a video rate selection algorithm used to increase the streaming quality. The adaptive video streaming system with proposed modules is implemented using an open source multimedia framework and is validated over emulated wireless/mobile networks. The emulator helps to model and emulate network conditions based on data collected from actual experiments. The experiment results show that the proposed mechanism provides higher video quality than the existing system provides and a rate of video streaming almost void of freezing.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.187-194
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• 2018

Recently, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) adaptive streaming service is attracting attention. The existing quality adaptive scheme of HTTP adaptive streaming service adjusts the video quality according to the network bandwidth or the client buffer size. However, the problem with the existing quality adaptive scheme is the QoE (Quality of Experience) degradation caused by the unnecessary quality change that occurs due to frequent bandwidth change or fixed buffer threshold. We propose a video quality maintenance scheme that improves average video quality and minimizes unnecessary quality change in order to improve the QoE of HTTP adaptive streaming service in the changing network environment. The proposed scheme maintains high quality for a long time by setting the quality maintenance duration to be long when buffer occupancy and video quality are high. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves QoE by improving the average video quality and minimizing the quality change.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.95-106
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• 2017

HTTP adaptive streaming has recently emerged to handle the rapidly growing traffic and to provide high quality multimedia contents. To improve the QoE (Quality of Experience) for HTTP adaptive streaming service, the average video bitrate should be maximized, and the video switching frequency (difference of bitrate between adjacent segments) and video stalling events need to be minimized. The recently proposed quality adaptation algorithms for HTTP adaptive streaming do not provide high QoE, since detailed QoE factors such as video switching frequency and bitrate difference of adjacent segments, are not considered. In this paper, we propose a SQA (Smooth Quality Adaptation) algorithm to improve the user QoE. The proposed algorithm provides the smoothed QoE, such that it minimizes the unnecessary video switching events by maintaining the quality in a certain period, thus minimizing the bitrate difference of adjacent segments. Through simulation, we confirm that the proposed algorithm reduces the unnecessary switching events, and prevents the sudden decrease in video quality.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.7
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• pp.827-833
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• 2016

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is a technique that adapts its video quality to network conditions for providing Quality of Experience. In the HAS approach, a video content is encoded at multiple bitrates and the encoded video content is divided into several video segments. A HAS player estimates the network bandwidth and adjusts the video bitrate based on estimated bandwidth. However, the segment scheduler in the conventional HAS player requests video segments periodically without considering TCP. If the waiting duration for the next segment request is quite long, the TCP connection can be initialized and it restarts slow-start. Slow-start causes the reduction in TCP throughput and consequentially leads to low-quality video streaming. In this study, we propose a TCP-aware segment scheduling scheme to improve performance of HAS service. The proposed scheme adjusts request time for the next video request to prevent initialization of TCP connection and also considers the point of scheduling time. The simulation proves that our scheme improves the Quality of Service of the HAS service without buffer underflow issue.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.824-831
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• 2014

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Adaptive Streaming is gaining attention because it changes bitrates to adapt changing network conditions. Since HAS (HTTP Adaptive Streaming) client downloads the video data based on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), it estimates incorrectly the available bandwidth and leads to an unnecessary video quality change in long-delay networks. In this paper, we propose a buffer-based quality control scheme in order to improve the service quality and smooth playback in the HAS. The proposed scheme estimates accurately the available bandwidth based on a modified streaming model that considers network delay. It also calculates the sustainability of the video quality to prevent an unnecessary quality change and determines the inter-request time on the basis of the buffer status. Through the simulation, we prove that our scheme improves the QoS (Quality of Service) of the HAS service and controls the video quality smoothly in long-delay networks.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.423-432
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• 2017

Recently, the video quality control schemes for the improvement of the QoE (Quality of Experience) of video streaming services that are based on DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP), which is a standard of HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) services, have been studied. However, the problem of the existing schemes is the degradation that is due to unnecessary quality changes because the VBR (Variable Bitrate) characteristics of the video are not considered. In this paper, we propose a SC-DASH (Segment Characteristics-based DASH) which controls the video quality based on the segment characteristics. The SC-DASH can prevent the occurrence of the unnecessary quality changes by controlling the video quality based on the size of the next segment, the segment throughput, and the buffer occupancy. The experiment results showed that the SC-DASH improves the QoE by reducing the unnecessary quality changes compared with the existing quality control schemes.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.635-644
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• 2013

Adaptive hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) streaming has become a new trend to support adaptivity in video delivery. An HTTP streaming client needs to estimate exactly resource availability and resource demand. In this paper, we focus on the most important resource which is bandwidth. A new and general formulation for throughput estimation is presented taking into account previous values of instant throughput and round trip time. Besides, we introduce for the first time the use of bitrate estimation in HTTP streaming. The experiments show that our approach can effectively cope with drastic changes in connection throughput and video bitrate.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.3804-3819
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• 2018

The increasing popularity of HTTP adaptive video streaming services has dramatically increased bandwidth requirements on operator networks, which attempt to shape their traffic through Deep Packet inspection (DPI). However, Google and certain content providers have started to encrypt their video services. As a result, operators often encounter difficulties in shaping their encrypted video traffic via DPI. This highlights the need for new traffic classification methods for encrypted HTTP adaptive video streaming to enable smart traffic shaping. These new methods will have to effectively estimate the quality representation layer and playout buffer. We present a new machine learning method and show for the first time that video quality representation classification for (YouTube) encrypted HTTP adaptive streaming is possible. The crawler codes and the datasets are provided in [43,44,51]. An extensive empirical evaluation shows that our method is able to independently classify every video segment into one of the quality representation layers with 97% accuracy if the browser is Safari with a Flash Player and 77% accuracy if the browser is Chrome, Explorer, Firefox or Safari with an HTML5 player.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.104-114
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• 2018

Recently, as HTTP-based video streaming traffic continues to increase, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP(DASH), which is one of the HTTP-based adaptive streaming(HAS) technologies, is receiving attention. Accordingly, many video quality control techniques have been proposed to provide a high quality of experience(QoE) to clients in a DASH environment. In this paper, we propose a new quality control method using ANFIS(Adaptive Network based Fuzzy Inference System) which is one of the neuro-fuzzy system structure. By using ANFIS, the proposed scheme can find fuzzy parameters that selects the appropriate segment bitrate for clients. Also, considering the characteristic of VBR video, the next segment download time can be more accurately predicted using the actual size of the segment. And, by using this, it adjusts video quality appropriately in the time-varying network. In the simulation using NS-3, we show that the proposed scheme shows higher average segment bitrate and lower number of bitrate-switching than the existing methods and provides improved QoE to the clients.