Multipath streaming: optimization and evaluation

Abstract

Quality of service (QoS) in delivery of continuous media (CM) over the Internet is still relatively poor, which is largely a result of packet losses often due to congestion. Previous work has shown that the use of multiple paths, existing in the network between a set of senders and a receiver, to deliver CM can be beneficial and should lead to improved QoS. In this paper, we study the problem of load distribution, i.e., properly distributing a CM stream among the multiple paths. We first focus on determining an appropriate optimization objective for computing the load distribution. We then conduct a performance study to understand the goodness of our optimization objectives and the resulting benefits of using multiple paths to deliver CM data.