Overhead and performance of low latency live streaming using MPEG-DASH

HTTP Streaming is a recent topic in multimedia communications with on-going standardization activities, especially with the MPEG DASH standard which covers on demand and live services. One of the main issues in live services deployment is the reduction of the overall latency. Low or very low latency streaming is still a challenge. In this paper, we push the use of DASH to its limits with regards to latency, down to fragments being only one frame, and evaluate the overhead introduced by that approach and the combination of: low latency video coding techniques, in particular Gradual Decoding Refresh; low latency HTTP streaming, in particular using chunked-transfer encoding; and associated ISOBMF packaging. We experiment DASH streaming using these techniques in local networks to measure the actual end-to-end latency, as low as 240 milliseconds, for an encoding and packaging overhead in the order of 13% for HD sequences and thus validate the feasibility of very low latency DASH live streaming in local networks.