Bandwidth-Efficient Multipath Transport Protocol for Quality-Guaranteed Real-Time Video Over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Recent technological advancements in wireless infrastructures and handheld devices enable mobile users to concurrently receive multimedia contents with different radio interfaces (e.g., cellular and Wi-Fi). However, multipath video transport over the resource-limited and error-prone wireless networks is challenged with key technical issues: 1) conventional multipath protocols are throughput-oriented, and video data are scheduled in a content-agnostic fashion and 2) high-quality real-time video is bandwidth-intensive and delay-sensitive. To address these critical problems, this paper proposes a bandwidth-efficient multipath streaming (BEMA) protocol featured by the priority-aware data scheduling and forward error correction-based reliable transmission. First, we present a mathematical framework to formulate the delay-constrained distortion minimization problem for concurrent video transmission over multiple wireless access networks. Second, we develop a joint Raptor coding and data distribution framework to achieve target video quality with minimum bandwidth consumption. The proposed BEMA is able to effectively mitigate packet reordering and path asymmetry to improve network utilization. We conduct performance evaluation through extensive emulations in Exata involving real-time H.264 video streaming. Compared with the existing multipath protocols, BEMA achieves appreciable improvements in terms of video peak signal-to-noise ratio, end-to-end delay, bandwidth utilization, and goodput. Therefore, BEMA is recommended for streaming high-quality real-time video to multihomed terminals in heterogeneous wireless networks.

I. Introduction

The massive deployment of various network infrastructures enables mobile users to surf the rich Internet contents with ubiquitous access options, e.g., wireless local area networks (802.11 family), cellular networks (UMTS, HSDPA, LTE), and broadband wireless networks (LTE and WiMAX). The state-of-the-art mobile terminals (e.g., the Samsung S5 smart phones [1] and Mushroom products [2]) are equipped with multiple radio interfaces to concurrently receive data through parallel wireless access networks. With the popularity of such multihomed mobile terminals, the future wireless networking is expected to incorporate heterogeneous access options for providing high-quality mobile services [3]–[7].