Best Paper: Excellence in DASH Award – MMSys 2016

The ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys) provides a forum for researchers to present and share their latest research findings in multimedia systems. While research about specific aspects of multimedia systems are regularly published in the various proceedings and transactions of the networking, operating system, realtime system, and database communities, MMSys aims to cut across these domains in the context of multimedia data types. This provides a unique opportunity to view the intersections and the inter-play of the various approaches and solutions developed across these domains to deal with multimedia data types.

In this work, we identify critical issues that contribute to the degradation of the performance of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) with respect to the rate control loops of DASH and TCP. We introduce a novel DASH quality adaptation algorithm denoted SQUAD, which is specifically designed to ensure high quality of experience (QoE). We implement and test our algorithm together with a number of state-of-the-art quality adaptation algorithms. Through extensive experiments on both testbed and cross-Atlantic Internet scenarios, we show that by sacrificing little to none in average quality bitrate, SQUAD provides significantly better QoE.

Our paper was awarded with the „Excellence in DASH Award“ by the DASH Industry Forum at MMSys 2016. The full paper is available here.