Optimization of Fairness for HTTP Adaptive Streaming with Network Assistance in LTE Mobile Systems

HTTP adaptive streaming is becoming dominant for commercial video streaming services. It is typically the client that chooses the rate based on estimation of the available network bandwidth in order to avoid the client buffer to be underrun or overrun. However, the unfairness among the clients and between the clients and other competing traffic has been identified as one of major issues that lead to degraded user service quality and system capacity. Therefore, this paper proposes a network assisted rate adaptation method for HTTP streaming in the radio access network. The simulation results show that the network rate assistance is able to guarantee a fair share of the network resources. As a result, the system capacity and the user service quality can be improved.