  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.
