  Adaptive HTTP streaming with centralized consideration of multiple streams
has gained increasing interest. It poses a special challenge that the interests
of both content provider and network operator need to be deliberately balanced.
More importantly, the adaptation strategy is required to be flexible enough to
be ported to various systems that work under different network environments,
QoE levels, and economic objectives. To address these challenges, we propose a
Markov Decision Process (MDP) based network-assisted adaptation framework,
wherein cost of buffering, significant playback variation, bandwidth management
and income of playback are jointly investigated. We then demonstrate its
promising service provisioning and maximal profit for a mobile network in which
fair or differentiated service is required.
