Sprinkle Prebuffer Strategy to Improve Quality of Experience with Less Data Wastage in Short-Form Video Streaming

In mobile short-form video streaming, the video application usually provides the user with a playlist of recommended videos to be played one by one. In order to prevent playback stalls caused by possible fluctuations in the mobile network, after finishing buffering the currently-playing video, commercial video players continue to prebuffer (i.e., buffer in advance before playback) one subsequent video in the playlist with as much content as possible. However, since the user can skip a video at any time if he/she does not like it, prebuffering too much video content leads to the wastage of mobile data. Contrarily, without prebuffering any subsequent video, the video player is exposed to high risks of stalling events, which threaten the user’s quality of experience (QoE). In this paper, a novel Sprinkle Prebuffer Strategy (SPS) is proposed to overcome such drawbacks. Once the currently-playing video’s buffer reaches an optimal buffer threshold, the proposed SPS attempts to concurrently prebuffer all subsequent videos in the playlist, each up to an optimal prebuffer threshold. Based on the evaluation results, it is proven that the proposed SPS outperforms the referenced methods in providing the best user’s QoE with reasonable compensation for data wastage.