Multipath live streaming via TCP: Scheme, performance and benefits

  • Authors:
  • Bing Wang;Wei Wei;Zheng Guo;Don Towsley

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Connecticut, USA;University of Connecticut, USA;University of Connecticut, USA;University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP)
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Motivated by the wide use of TCP for multimedia streaming in practice and the increasing availability of multipath between end hosts, we study multipath live streaming via TCP in this article. We first design a simple and practical TCP-based multipath streaming scheme, named Dynamic MPath-streaming (DMP-streaming), which dynamically distributes packets over multiple paths by implicitly inferring the available bandwidths on these paths. To allow systematic performance study, we develop an analytical model for DMP-streaming and validate the model using extensive ns simulation and Internet experiments. We explore the parameter space of this model and find that DMP-streaming generally provides satisfactory performance when the aggregate achievable TCP throughput is 1.6 times the video bitrate, when allowing a few seconds of startup delay. Last, we comment on the benefits of using multipath versus single path for TCP-based streaming.