SMASH: a Supervised Machine Learning Approach to Adaptive Video Streaming over HTTP.

Abstract

The growth of online video-on-demand consumption continues unabated. Existing heuristic-based adaptive bitrate (ABR) selection algorithms are typically designed to optimise video quality within a very narrow context. This may lead to video streaming providers implementing different ABR algorithms/players, based on a network connection, device capabilities, video content, etc., in order to serve the multitude of their usersâ streaming requirements. In this paper, we present SMASH: a Supervised Machine learning approach to Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, which takes a tentative step towards the goal of a one-size-fits-all approach to ABR. We utilise the streaming output from the adaptation logic of nine ABR algorithms across a variety of streaming scenarios (generating nearly one million records) and design a machine learning model, using systematically selected features, to predict the optimal choice of the bitrate of the next video segment to download. Our evaluation results show that not only does SMASH guarantee a high QoE but its performance is consistent across a variety of streaming contexts.