Fountain Coded Streaming for SAGIN With Learning-Based Pause-and-Listen

Efficient adaptive bitrate streaming (ABS) over long-distance and lossy space-air-ground-integrated network (SAGIN) links is an important demand, where fountain transmission is attractive as it does not require feedback/retransmissions. However, the conventional fountain scheme may waste many packets due to the propagation delay of stop messages. This letter proposes a novel fountain coded ABS design with a pause-and-listen approach which, across segments of ABS, learns proper pause time in an on-line manner based on multi-armed bandit modeling. Evaluation using a real-life implementation shows that the scheme can avoid most packet wastes while still maintaining the key benefits of the fountain transmission.