Premium quality or guaranteed fluidity? Client-transparent DASH-aware bandwidth allocation at the radio access network

In this paper we propose a novel client-transparent Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)-aware bandwidth allocation strategy. The approach, while being application layer transparent, guarantees fluidity to all users but it provides priority-based services to premium users, identified by their Willingness-To-Pay (WTP) profiles. Since different service qualities can be accommodated using WTP, the approach can be extended to XR services, immersive videos, live uplink streaming. To achieve this goal, the allocation problem is firstly formulated as a classical Game Theory problem whose closed form solution is clearly understood in the literature. In a nutshell, the WTP-based, Game Theoretically Optimal Bandwidth Allocation (WTP-GTOBA), firstly satisfies the minimum bandwidth needs of each user and then fairly distributes the residual bandwidth. WTP-GTOBA can be approximately implemented by a greedy, application layer transparent algorithm to be implemented at a DASH-aware network element managing different neighbouring radio access stations. Thereby, the proposed method is suitable for integration of WTP and resource management among multiple service providers and heterogeneous client groups. Numerical simulations carried out under a realistic scenario show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art application-layer transparent competitors, providing premium quality and/or guaranteed fluidity to different users based on their WTP.