Stateless Network-Aware Adaptive Bitrate Streaming over IPFS

Abstract

Modern content delivery is increasingly decentralized, improving availability, cost, and reach for geographically distributed users. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a promising approach that uses content-based identifiers distributed across a global peer-to-peer network. Although IPFS improves fault tolerance, resilience, and censorship resistance, its unpredictable environment introduces significant performance variability that limits conventional Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming and degrades Quality of Experience (QoE). Recent network-aware ABR solutions address this by incorporating IPFS-specific information into bitrate decisions. However, they rely on maintaining continuously synchronized state across consumers and providers, which can quickly become stale under peer churn, provider migrations, network partitions, and changing content distributions, making existing policies less effective. We investigate whether network-aware ABR can remain effective without synchronized adaptation state, and present a stateless network-aware ABR policy for IPFS-based video streaming. Our approach replaces provider-stateful adaptation with an observation-driven policy that recomputes the bitrate for each segment using only locally observable request-time signals. To preserve adaptation context without provider-side state, the client embeds its adaptation state in HTTP headers, keeping it under client control and carried transparently across requests. By eliminating cross-provider state synchronization, the framework improves robustness to failures and network reconfigurations while simplifying deployment at scale. Early results show the approach maintains high QoE in faulty conditions, improving it by up to roughly 6x over existing solutions. These findings demonstrate that stateless network-aware adaptation provides a practical and scalable foundation for decentralized video delivery.