Internet traffic is dramatically increasing with the development of network technologies and video streaming traffic accounts for large amount within the total traffic, which reveals the importance to guarantee the quality of content delivery service. Based on the network conditions, adaptive bitrate (ABR) control is utilized as a common technique which can choose the proper bitrate to ensure the video streaming quality. In this paper, new bitrate control method, QuDASH is proposed by taking advantage of the emerging quantum technology. In QuDASH, the adaptive control model is developed using the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), which aims at increasing the average bitrate and decreasing the video rebuffering events to maximize the user quality of experience (QoE). In order to formulate the video control model, first the QUBO terms of different factors are defined regarding video quality, bitrate change, and buffer condition. Then, all the individual QUBO terms are merged to generate an objective function. By minimizing the QUBO objective function, the bitrate choice is determined from the solution. The control model is solved by Digital Annealer, which is a quantum-inspired computing technology. The evaluation of the proposed method is carried out by simulation with the throughput traces obtained in real world under different scenarios and the comparison with other methods is conducted. Experiment results demonstrated that the proposed QuDASH method has better performance in terms of QoE compared with other advanced ABR methods. In 68.2% of the examined cases, QuDASH achieves the highest QoE results, which shows the superiority of the QuDASH over conventional methods.

翻译：随着网络技术的发展，互联网流量急剧增长，其中视频流流量占总流量的很大比重，这凸显了保障内容交付服务质量的重要性。基于网络条件，自适应比特率（ABR）控制作为一种常用技术，能够选择合适的比特率以确保视频流质量。本文利用新兴的量子技术，提出了一种新的比特率控制方法QuDASH。在QuDASH中，基于二次无约束二进制优化（QUBO）构建了自适应控制模型，旨在提高平均比特率并减少视频重缓冲事件，从而最大化用户体验质量（QoE）。为构建视频控制模型，首先针对视频质量、比特率变化和缓冲区条件等不同因素定义了QUBO项，然后将所有独立的QUBO项合并生成目标函数。通过最小化QUBO目标函数，从求解结果中确定比特率选择。该控制模型采用量子启发式计算技术Digital Annealer进行求解。通过在不同场景下利用实际网络吞吐量轨迹进行仿真，评估了所提方法，并与其他方法进行了对比。实验结果表明，与其他先进ABR方法相比，所提QuDASH方法在QoE方面性能更优。在68.2%的测试案例中，QuDASH取得了最高QoE结果，展现了其相对于传统方法的优越性。