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.
IEEE Transactions on Communications