DOWI

DASH Optimization Engine for Wireless Networks

Description

One of the most popular and bandwidth-demanding in nowadays networks is Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) video streaming, which prevails as the main mechanism to consume on-demand videos from the Internet and is expected to increase in the upcoming years. However, although DASH players implement rate adaptation techniques to adapt video quality to network and playback conditions, if a user’s device lacks a global view of the network in bottleneck scenarios (eg. dense WLANs), this situation leads to poor QoE and global performance, resulting in unfairness among other users, quality instability and video freezing.

DOWI is a novel solution to obtain a proportional allocation of resources among DASH clients in dense wireless networks, according to the properties of the video streams and the characteristics of the wireless channel. By means of its novel algorithm, which jointly optimizes fair airtime allocation and video-rate recommendations, it maximizes the QoE of the DASH clients and improves the efficiency of the access network.

Currently, i2CAT has implemented DOWI in a realistic ultra-dense deployment based on a simulated In-Flight Entertainment Connectivity (IFEC) scenario and the results show that DOWI is able to avoid the main problems which impact the QoE of state-of-the-art rate adaptation algorithms, as is the case of instability and buffer underrunning, without decreasing the video rate of the clients.

The widespread implantation of DOWI will allow wireless network users to consume DASH video streams in dense traffic scenarios with the best Quality of Experience possible. These possible scenarios include:

  •  Airplanes
  •  Trains
  •  Music festivals
  •  Trade fairs

DOWI’s method has a patent application under the priority number EP20382491.

Currently, DOWI’s technology is looking for licensees in these fields of application. For more information, please, contact [email protected].