MSU Technologies

A New Paradigm for Video Streaming

Introduction

HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has emerged as the dominant framework for video streaming mainly due to its simplicity, firewall friendliness, and ease of deployment. HAS solutions rely on popular protocols, such as HTTP and TCP, and on standard network services. Some of the primary challenges include inefficiency in using network resources, and its inherent delays and a highly undesirable oscillatory behavior that changes the streamed video bitrate and its quality profile rather frequently. These issues have resulted in problems in degrading the end users’ Quality-of-Experience and, in some instances, to failure to adhere to basic Service Level Agreements between the ISP providers and their customers. These problems could lead to a negative impact on the overall video market in a very significant way.

Description of Technology

This technology is a novel video streaming framework that is capable of delivering optimal and consistent quality-of-experience while requiring minimal low- complexity network support. We refer to our framework as Erasable Packets within Internet Queues (EPIQ). There are two important aspects of the proposed EPIQ framework. First, EPIQ is based on a novel packetization of the video content in a way that exploits the inherent multi-priority nature of video. In short, each EPIQ packet consists of multiple segments, and where each segment consists of video data of a different priority. The highest priority segment is placed next to the packet header whereas the lowest priority segment is placed at the tail of the packet.

Key Benefits