6 August 2018 – PhD student Abdelhak Bentaleb won first place in the Grand Challenge on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) held from 23 to 27 July, at San Diego, California.
Real-time entertainment services, like video and audio streaming, currently account for more than 70% of the Internet traffic during peak hours. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, or DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technology that enables high quality media streaming over the Internet. DASH allows for video quality to switch midstream based on the network’s available speed, which helps reduce buffering of media content.
The Grand Challenge invites researchers to address end-to-end delivery aspects of DASH that will help improve the quality of viewing experience, while keeping network resources optimal. Over 20 teams participated in the challenge, with a total of six papers submitted.
This is Abdelhak’s third award for his work in creating a game theory based DASH system. He recently won first place in the Excellence in DASH award and the best student paper award at this year’s ACM International Conference on Multimedia Systems (ACM MMSys) for developing an adaptive bitrate (ABR) scheme that uses game theory to select the best optimal bitrate. Building on their research, Abdelhak and his team, Associate Professor Roger Zimmermann and Özyeğin University Assistant Professor Ali C. Begen, created a practical implementation of their research. According to their paper, “Game Theory Based Bitrate Adaptation for dash.js Reference Player”, the team’s approach optimises the viewing experience across multiple players, and maintains a high playback bitrate while reducing startup delays, quality switches, and stalls.
“Our proposed solution will solve some of the critical issues like video quality instability, stalls, and long startup delay. Also, our research shows that our player outperforms most of the well-known ABR solutions,” said Abdelhak.
“The experience has been a really memorable moment for me, to be able to learn many new things and to meet professors from other universities and key industry players. I am thankful for my PhD supervisor, Prof Zimmermann, and Prof Begen for their contributions,” added Abdelhak.
Abdelhak is a PhD student in Computer Science, under the supervision of Prof Zimmermann. His research focuses on multimedia systems and communication, video streaming architecture and content delivery.
