Congestion Control and Packet Scheduling for Multipath Real Time Video Streaming

Abstract

Real time video traffic has stringent delay requirement and is bandwidth demanding when streaming over the internet. Single path transmission may provide unsatisfactory picture quality to users due to packet loss, jitter, and low bandwidth. Multipath transmission is another option to achieve better service by aggregating bandwidth and exploiting path diversity. As utility maximization theory shows, to achieve better satisfaction is to provide higher throughput and lower frame delivery delay for real time video traffic. The congestion control is responsible to probe maximum available bandwidth and packet scheduling is to take advantages of path diversity, which are two key research points in multipath context and are also the main concern in this paper. Given the BBR congestion control algorithm causes high-packet loss rate and large transmission delay when BBR flows competing for bandwidth resource, a delay response BBR (Delay-BBR) algorithm is proposed for real time video transmission. The main idea is that the sender will actively reduce the rate to let intermediate routers drain the excess occupied buffer once round trip delay signal exceeds a certain threshold. The results show that the delay-BBR can achieve lower transmission delay and lower packet loss rate when compared with QUIC-BBR and WebRTC-BBR. The rate stable feature makes delay-BBR appropriate for real time video transmission. Moreover, a packet scheduling algorithm works in coordination with the rate control algorithm achieves lower frame delivery delay further compared with the benchmark algorithms.