Toward WebTransport Support in HTTP Adaptive Streaming

The 10th IEEE International Conference on Communications and Electronics 2024

July 31st – August 2nd 2024, Da Nang, Vietnam

Authors: Minh Nguyen, Philip Nys, Stefan Pham, Daniel Silhavy, Stefan Arbanowski, Stephan Steglich

Abstract: Recent years have observed a drastic improvement in video streaming. However, there are still non-trivial open issues that need to be solved, including latency and throughput estimation.
In this paper, we present latency improvements to video streaming using WebTransport, a new transport Application Programming Interface (API) for the web platform that enables low-latency, bidirectional communication between web applications and servers. The API is built on top of QUIC, a modern transport protocol that provides low latency, secure, and reliable communication over the internet.

By taking advantage of WebTransport’s server push, we present how the latency (e.g., the startup time) of a stream can be decreased compared to HTTP. Furthermore, we propose an efficient way to estimate throughput by leveraging WebTransport, especially for Common Media Application Format (CMAF) low-latency live streaming use cases. The comparisons are conducted with the current version of one of the most popular Dynamic HTTP Adaptive Streaming players, namely dash.js. The goal of these experiments is to identify use cases, where WebTransport could enhance existing dash.js functionality. The experimental results show the outperformance of WebTransport with an improvement of 28% in startup time. Our proposed throughput estimation in WebTransport also presents its ability to detect changes in throughput faster than the conventional technique with acceptable accuracy.

Keywords: QUIC, WebTransport, HTTP Adaptive Streaming, dash.js, DASH, Media over QUIC