An Evaluation of ABR Switching for Time-Shifted Clients in MoQ
This work addresses the problem of quality-switching for time-shifted clients in MoQ, an incremental contribution that validates existing ABR methods in a new context.
The paper evaluates SWITCH-style Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) for time-shifted clients in Media over QUIC, finding that standard ABR algorithms can be applied directly to time-shifted playback, yielding substantially higher throughput.
Media over QUIC enables ultra low latency video streaming over QUIC, but its default quality-switching semantics risk introducing playback gaps during periods of network congestion. The in-progress SWITCH specification for MOQ Transport aims to streamline rate adaptation for MoQ. In this work, we characterize the performance of SWITCH-style Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) for both live and time-shifted clients in a Mininet simulated topology. We validate that standard ABR algorithms can be directly applied to time-shifted playback without modification, yielding substantially higher throughput. We demonstrate that a subscriber can experience increased overall throughput after a rebuffering scenario, and we identify focal points for further optimizations of MoQ ABR switching.