Grad: Learning for Overhead-aware Adaptive Video Streaming with Scalable Video Coding

Video streaming commonly uses Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) to deliver good Quality of Experience (QoE) to users. Videos used in DASH are predominantly encoded by single-layered video coding such as H.264/AVC. In comparison, multi-layered video coding such as H.264/SVC provides more flexibility for upgrading the quality of buffered video segments and has the potential to further improve QoE. However, there are two challenges for using SVC in DASH: (i) the complexity in designing ABR algorithms; and (ii) the negative impact of SVC's coding overhead. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning method called Grad for designing ABR algorithms that take advantage of the quality upgrade mechanism of SVC. Additionally, we quantify the impact of coding overhead on the achievable QoE of SVC in DASH, and propose jump-enabled hybrid coding (HYBJ) to mitigate the impact. Through emulation, we demonstrate that Grad-HYBJ, an ABR algorithm for HYBJ learned by Grad, outperforms the best performing state-of-the-art ABR algorithm by 17% in QoE.