Optimal Strategies for Live Video Streaming in the Low-latency Regime

Low-latency is a critical user Quality-of-Experience (QoE) metric for live video streaming. It poses significant challenges for streaming over the Internet. In this paper, we explore the design space of low-latency live video streaming by developing dynamic models and optimal control strategies. We further develop practical live video streaming algorithms within the Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, namely MPC-Live, to maximize user QoE by adapting the video bitrate while maintaining low end-to-end video latency in dynamic network environment. Through extensive experiments driven by real network traces, we demonstrate that our live video streaming algorithms can improve the performance dramatically within latency range of two to five seconds.