Optimising DASH over AQM-enabled Gateways Using Intra-chunk Parallel Retrieval (Chunklets)

Multimedia streaming is a significant source of Internet traffic, with Netflix and YouTube accounting for more than 50% of North American fixed network peak download traffic in 2016. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is a recent standard for live and on-demand video streaming services, where clients adapt the video quality on-the-fly to match the network capacity by requesting multi-rate video chunk-by-chunk. Emerging Active Queue Management (AQM) schemes such as PIE and FQ-CoDel are being progressively deployed either at the ISP-end and/or home gateway to counter bufferbloat and will impact consumer DASH streams. We propose using intra-chunk parallel connections (chunklets) to retrieve DASH content when bottlenecks implement AQMs. We experimentally evaluate and characterise the impact of using chunklets over traditional FIFO, symmetric/asymmetric PIE and FQ-CoDel AQM bottlenecks. We show FQ-CoDel's flow isolation and fair capacity sharing ability enables DASH chunklets to attain the best throughput multiplication effect, hence translating to better user experience in the presence of competing elastic flows.