A Study of Factors Which Influence QoD of HTTP Video Streaming Based on Adobe Flash Technology

Abstract: Recently, there has been a significant rise in the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) video streaming usage worldwide. However, the knowledge of performance of HTTP video streaming is still limited, especially in the aspect of factors which affect video quality. The reason is that HTTP video streaming has different characteristics from other video streaming systems. In this thesis, we show how the delivered quality of a Flash video playback is affected by different factors from diverse layers of the video delivery system, including congestion control algorithm, delay variation, playout buffer length, video bitrate and so on. We introduce Quality of Delivery Degradation (QoDD) then we use it to measure how much the Quality of Delivery (QoD) is degraded in terms of QoDD. The study is processed in a dedicated controlled environment, where we could alter the influential factors and then measure what is happening. After that, we use statistic method to analyze the data and find the relationships between influential factors and quality of video delivery which are expressed by mathematic models. The results show that the status and choices of factors have a significant impact on the QoD. By proper control of the factors, the quality of delivery could be improved. The improvements are approximately 24% by TCP memory size, 63% by congestion control algorithm, 30% by delay variation, 97% by delay when considering delay variation, 5% by loss and 92% by video bitrate.