Adaptive Rate Control for Live streaming using SRT protocol

Media delivery represents one of the main challenges for future networks which aim to converge Broadcast and Broadband video traffic into a common telecommunication network architecture. Nowadays, contents streamed over Internet are delivered in two different manners depending on the application: Video on Demand and Live Streaming. For the former, HTTP-based streaming technologies, such as Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH), are widely employed for unicast and broadcast communications. It also enables Adaptive Rate Control on the client device allowing players to select a representation and bitrate matching the capabilities of the network at any moment. For the latter, MPEGDASH does not provide low latency for Live streaming when compared to a Broadcast service. Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) is proposed by SRT Alliance to overcome such limitations of unicast and broadcast communications. Nevertheless, it misses the adaptation of the content to the available network resources. In this paper, we show an implementation of Adaptive Rate Control for SRT protocol which exploits periodical network reports in order to adapt the content encoding process. The evaluation includes a real deployment of the solution and a comparison with a legacy SRT stream.