Comparison of DASH adaptation strategies based on bitrate and quality signalling

During a Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) video transmission, the client can dynamically adapt the bitrate of the requested stream to changes in network conditions, by switching between different versions of the same content encoded at different bitrates, called representations. Each representation is split in smaller portions, called segments, and representation switching can be done at each segment. In this paper, we propose a comparative analysis of different adaptation strategies for representation switching, which exploit information on the bitrate and the visual quality of the different available versions of the requested content, at representation or at segment level. The results allow to identify the advantages and drawbacks related to each strategy in terms of bandwidth exploitation, maximization of visual quality and risk of buffer underflow.