Comprehensive Multistep Prefetching Strategy for Short Video Streaming

The short video market is currently growing rapidly. As a typical bandwidth-intensive application, short video streaming can easily cause bandwidth bottlenecks in servers. Hence, we propose a prefetching strategy to improve the quality of experience (QoE) and reduce the wastage of bandwidth, utilizing computility for performance optimization. We reveal that the state-of-the-art Dashlet prefetching strategy fails to maximize the weighted sum of QoE and bandwidth usage (i.e., utility). To overcome this limitation, the proposed comprehensive multistep prefetching strategy (CMPS) for short video streaming computes the prefetching urgency of chunks and combines it with expected utility to comprehensively evaluate multistep decision sequences, achieving higher QoE and bandwidth utilization than Dashlet. The extensive evaluations show that the proposed CMPS improves the average utility across diverse scenarios by 16.1% compared with Dashlet.