Mejora del streaming de vídeo en DASH con codificación de bitrate variable mediante el algoritmo Look Ahead y mecanismos de coordinación para la reproducción, y propuesta de nuevas métricas para la evaluación de la QoE

This thesis presents several proposals aimed at improving video transmission through the DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) standard. This research work studies the DASH transmission protocol and its characteristics. At the same time, this work proposes the use of encoding with constant quality and variable bitrate as the most suitable video content encoding mode for on-demand content transmission through the DASH standard. Based on the proposal to use the constant quality encoding mode, the role played by adaptation algorithms in the user experience when consuming multimedia content becomes more important. In this sense, this thesis presents an adaptation algorithm called Look Ahead which, without modifying the standard, allows the use of the information on the sizes of the video segments included in the multimedia containers to avoid making adaptation decisions that lead to undesirable stalls during the playback of multimedia content. In order to evaluate the improvements of the presented adaptation algorithm, three models of objective QoE evaluation are proposed. These models allow to predict in a simple way the QoE that users would have in an objective way, using well-known parameters such as the average bitrate, the PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and the VMAF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion). All of them applied to each segment. Finally, the DASH behavior in Wi-Fi environments with high user density is analyzed. In this context, there could be a high number of stalls in the playback because of a bad estimation of the available transfer rate due to the ON/OFF pattern of DASH download and to the variability of the access to the Wi-Fi environment. To relieve this situation, a coordination service based on SAND (MPEG’s Server and Network Assisted DASH) is proposed, which provides an estimation of the transfer rate based on the information of the state of the clients’ players.