VASE: Enhancing Adaptive BitRate selection for VBR-encoded audio and video content with deep reinforcement learning

Adaptive BitRate (ABR) algorithms have become increasingly prevalent in modern streaming platforms, offering users significant improvements in the Quality of Experience (QoE). With streaming providers like YouTube and Netflix shifting to high-fidelity audio formats such as stereophonic sound and Dolby Atoms, ensuring proper audio and video adaptation has become a critical aspect of modern streaming platforms. Additionally, Variable Bitrate (VBR) encoding has gained great popularity in encoding audio and video content, given its higher quality-to-bits ratio. However, the considerable variability in network bandwidth, in combination with VBR features such as significantly fluctuating audio/video chunk sizes and diverse content complexity, makes existing ABR schemes formidable to make optimal bitrate selection due to their overlook of audio adaptation or oblivious to VBR features. In this paper, we introduce a new ABR approach for VBR-based Audio-aware video StrEaming named VASE, which harnesses deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and exploits parallel computing with multiple agents to swiftly and adeptly manage fluctuations in video/audio chunk sizes, network bandwidth, and varying content complexity, all while operating without any assumptions. Besides, two variants are proposed to mitigate the download energy cost and handle audio and video content in finer granularity. Extensive trace-driven, testbed, and subjective evaluations show that our scheme surpasses existing advanced adaptation schemes regarding the overall QoE, effectively demonstrating its superiority.