An Experimental Study of the Server-based Unfairness Solutions for the Cross-Protocol Scenario of Adaptive Streaming over HTTP/3 and HTTP/2

Abstract

Since the introduction of the HTTP/3, research has focused on evaluating its influences on the existing adaptive streaming over HTTP (HAS). Among these research, due to irrelevant transport protocols, the cross-protocol unfairness between the HAS over HTTP/3 (HAS/3) and HAS over HTTP/2 (HAS/2) has caught considerable attention. It has been found that the HAS/3 clients tend to request higher bitrates than the HAS/2 clients because the transport QUIC obtains higher bandwidth for its HAS/3 clients than the TCP for its HAS/2 clients. As the problem originates from the transport layer, it is likely that the server-based unfairness solutions can help the clients overcome such a problem. Therefore, in this paper, an experimental study of the server-based unfairness solutions for the cross-protocol scenario of the HAS/3 and HAS/2 is conducted. The results show that, while the bitrate guidance solution fails to help the clients achieve fairness, the bandwidth allocation solution provides superior performance.

Keywords

• Adaptive Streaming, Cross-Protocol, HTTP/3, QUIC, Server, Unfairness