Which Adaptation Logic? An Objective and Subjective Performance Evaluation of HTTP-based Adaptive Media Streaming Systems

Multimedia content delivery over the Internet is predominantly using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as its primary protocol and multiple proprietary solutions exits. The MPEG standard Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) provides an interoperable solution and in recent years various adaptation logics/algorithms have been proposed. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive evaluation of the various logics/algorithms. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of ten different adaptation logics/algorithms, which have been proposed in the past years. The evaluation is done both objectively and subjectively. The former is using a predefined bandwidth trajectory within a controlled environment and the latter is done in a real-world environment adopting crowdsourcing. The results shall provide insights about which strategy can be adopted in actual deployment scenarios. Additionally, the evaluation methodology described in this paper can be used to evaluate any other/new adaptation logic and to compare it directly with the results reported here.