Due to the surging bandwidth demand for applications like $360°$ video streaming, hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) adaptive video streaming has been extended to fetch contents from a single server to multiple servers. However, when players share a bottleneck link, it fails to hold three critical properties: fairness, efficiency, and stability. Effective algorithms have been proposed to tackle the problem in the single-server case. We revisit the three properties and show that they degenerate in multi-server streaming. In this paper, we propose MultiFast, a protocol that offers the best user experience by achieving fair, efficient, and stable multi-server video streaming. MultiFast consists of (1) a bitrate selection algorithm that ensures fairness with concurrent connections; (2) a connection management algorithm that ensures efficiency and stability by managing connections based on network conditions. Our real-world experiments show that MultiFast achieves the best performance in fairness, efficiency, and stability metrics, outperforming its closest alternative.

由于对诸如以下应用程序的带宽需求激增 $360°$视频流，超文本传输​​协议 (HTTP) 自适应视频流已扩展为从单个服务器到多个服务器获取内容。然而，当玩家共享一个瓶颈环节时，它无法保持三个关键属性：公平性、效率和稳定性。已经提出了有效的算法来解决单服务器情况下的问题。我们重新审视了这三个属性，并表明它们在多服务器流中退化。在本文中，我们提出了MultiFast，一种通过实现公平、高效和稳定的多服务器视频流来提供最佳用户体验的协议。MultiFast 包含 (1) 一种比特率选择算法，可确保并发连接的公平性；(2) 一种连接管理算法，通过根据网络状况管理连接来保证效率和稳定性。我们的实际实验表明，MultiFast 在公平性、效率和稳定性指标方面实现了最佳性能，优于其最接近的替代方案。