eBandit: Kernel-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Video Streaming

ArXi:2604.08791v1 Announce Type: cross User-space Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) algorithms cannot see the transport layer signals that matter most, such as minimum RTT and instantaneous delivery rate, and they respond to network changes only after damage has already propagated to the playout buffer. We present eBandit, a framework that relocates both network monitoring and ABR algorithm selection into the Linux kernel using eBPF. A lightweight epsilon-greedy Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) runs inside a sockops program, evaluating three ABR heuristics against a reward derived from live TCP metrics.