Streaming High-Quality Mobile Video with Multipath TCP in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The proliferating wireless infrastructures with complementary characteristics prompt the bandwidth aggregation for concurrent video transmission in heterogeneous access networks. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an important transport-layer protocol recommended by IETF to integrate different access medium (e.g., Cellular and Wi-Fi). This paper investigates the problem of mobile video delivery using MPTCP in heterogeneous wireless networks with multihomed terminals. To achieve the optimal quality of real-time video streaming, we have to seriously consider the path asymmetry in different access networks and the disadvantages of the data retransmission mechanism in MPTCP. Motivated by addressing these critical issues, this study presents a novel quAlity-Driven MultIpath TCP (ADMIT) scheme that integrates the utility maximization based Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding and rate allocation. We develop an analytical framework to model the MPTCP-based video delivery quality over multiple communication paths. ADMIT is able to effectively integrate the most reliable access networks with FEC coding to minimize the end-to-end video distortion. The performance of ADMIT is evaluated through extensive semi-physical emulations in Exata involving H.264 video streaming. Experimental results show that ADMIT outperforms the reference transport protocols in terms of video PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio), end-to-end delay, and goodput. Thus, we recommend ADMIT for streaming high-quality mobile video in heterogeneous wireless networks with multihomed terminals.

1 Introduction

Recent advancements in the network infrastructures and communication technologies of wireless systems provide ubiquitous access options for mobile users (e.g., LTE, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, 3G, etc.) [1] , [2], [3], [4]. As these different wireless networks have complementary characteristics, it is desirable for the individual mobiles to establish multiple simultaneous associations to improve data throughput and transmission reliability [5], [6]. With the prevalence of multihomed terminals (e.g., the Samsung S5 smart cell phones [7] and Mushroom products [8]), the future wireless environment is envisioned to be a converged system that incorporates heterogeneous access networks for providing high-quality mobile services. Therefore, new research trends [9], [10], [11] have moved towards integrating the heterogeneous access networks with Multipath TCP (MPTCP) [12] , which is the transport-layer protocol recommended by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) to enable parallel data transfer (as shown in Fig. 1).