QoE-aware Traffic Shaping for HTTP Adaptive Streaming

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become a prevailing technology for media delivery nowadays. It enables high quality streaming of media content over the internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. However, its on-off traffic pattern constructed by segmented transmission can lead to some performance problems, such as instability, inefficiency and unfairness, while multiple clients compete for limit bandwidth. And the reason caused these poor performance has been pointed out in the past studies. In this paper, we present a QoE-aware traffic shaping method that is based on two QoE maximization metrics. A key benefit of this approach is that it calculates optimal shaping rate to help clients to adjust its request for subsequent segment quality level. Additionally, this method can ensure optimal quality of experience toward end users. The simulation results show that this proposed approach improves the stability, utilization and provides the optimal quality of experience for large number of users.