Service provisioning and profit maximization in network-assisted adaptive HTTP streaming

Mobile adaptive HTTP streaming with centralized consideration of multiple streams has gained increasing interest. It poses a special challenge that the interests of both content provider and network operator need to be deliberately balanced. More importantly, the adaptation is required to be flexible enough to be ported to various systems that work under different network environments, QoE levels, and economic objectives. To address these challenges, we propose a Markov Decision Process (MDP) based network-assisted adaptation framework, wherein cost of buffering, significant playback variation, bandwidth management and income of playback are jointly investigated. We then demonstrate its promising service provisioning and maximal profit for a mobile network in which fair or differentiated service is required.