MUCH: Priority-based collaborative multi-channel HTTP adaptive streaming

HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) provides an effective means to deploy media streaming applications over today's Internet. A major challenge in developing such an application is how to deal with bandwidth competition among multiple video channels. The client-driven nature of HAS makes it difficult to provide server-side resource management, and the dynamic adaptability of HAS complicates the situation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a priority-based multichannel collaborative HAS scheme to provide differentiated HAS services among channels. Different from the start-of-the-art client-oriented approaches, the solution refocuses on the server and employs a dynamic HAS request response algorithm on the server side. The algorithm guarantees the pre-allocated bandwidth for each channel by the request management and allows flexible bandwidth occupation among different channels to collaboratively utilize the server bandwidth resources. At the same time, it still obeys the client-driven nature of HAS. The rate adaptation decisions of each client are still made locally to ensure an automatic reactive system. The scheme has been carefully evaluated in both simulation and real-world environments with different client adaptive algorithms. For the evaluation results, compared with its benchmarks, the scheme both achieves the channel-specific priority-based quality assurance and improves the server resource utilization.