Nearly Equal Delay Path Set Configuration (NEED-PC) for Multipath Delay Jitter Reduction

Abstract

Delay jitter degrades the quality of delay-sensitive live media streaming. We investigate the use of multipath transmission with two paths to reduce delay jitter and, in this paper, propose a nearly equal delay path set configuration (NEED-PC) scheme that further improves the performance of the multipath delay jitter reduction method for delay-sensitive live media streaming. The NEED-PC scheme configures a pair of a maximally node-disjoint paths that have nearly equal path delays and satisfy a given delay constraint. The results of our simulation experiments show that path sets configured by the NEED-PC scheme exhibit better delay jitter reduction characteristics than a conventional scheme that chooses the shortest path as the primary path. We evaluate the performance of path sets configured by the NEED-PC scheme and find that the NEED-PC scheme reduces delay jitter when it is applied to a multipath delay jitter reduction method. We also investigate the trade-off between reduced delay jitter and the increased traffic load incurred by applying multipath transmission to more flows. The results show that the NEED-PC scheme is practically effective even if the amount of additional redundant traffic caused by using multipath transmission is taken into account.