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There are many available commercial streaming solutions that perform quality adaption. An important issue with respect to users' perceived quality is how the system schedules the quality levels to match the available network resources. In this study, we compare several adaptive media players on the market to see how they perform in challenging streaming scenarios on a mobile 3G network. Bandwidth data collected in real-world field trials is used in all tests. We investigate how the media players respond to fluctuating bandwidth and outages, and how this affects the quality levels used, the bandwidth utilization, and the number and duration of buffer underruns. We found significant differences in performance and optimization goals between the different players' schedulers. We conclude that the quality scheduler is an important factor in providing a satisfying quality of experience when using an adaptive media player.
Riiser et al. (Fri,) studied this question.