MultiLive: Adaptive Bitrate Control for Low-Delay Multi-Party Interactive Live Streaming

In multi-party interactive live streaming, each user can act as both the sender and the receiver of a live video stream. Designing adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm for such applications poses three challenges: (i) due to the interaction requirement among the users, the playback buffer has to be kept small to reduce the end-to-end delay; (ii) the algorithm needs to decide what is the bitrate to receive and what is the set of bitrates to send; (iii) the delay and quality requirements between each pair of users may differ, for instance, depending on whether the pair is interacting directly with each other. To address these challenges, we first develop a quality of experience (QoE) model for multi-party live streaming applications. Based on this model, we design MultiLive, an adaptive bitrate control algorithm for the multi-party scenario. MultiLive models the many-to-many ABR selection problem as a non-linear programming problem. Solving the non-linear programming equation yields the target bitrate for each pair of sender-receiver. To alleviate system errors during the modeling and measurement process, we update the target bitrate through the buffer feedback adjustment. To address the throughput limitation of the uplink, we cluster the ideal streams into a few groups, and aggregate these streams through scalable video coding for transmissions. We also deploy the algorithm on a commercial live streaming platform that provides such services for more than 2300 users. The experimental results show that MultiLive outperforms the fixed bitrate algorithm, with 2-5× improvement in average QoE. Furthermore, the end-to-end delay is reduced to around 100 ms, much lower than the 400 ms threshold recommended for video conferencing.