PR-MPTCP+: Context-aware QoE-oriented multipath TCP partial reliability extension for real-time multimedia applications

Abstract

One major concern when applying Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to the real-time multimedia applications is related to MPTCP's fully-reliable and fully-ordered service nature, which will inevitably degrade users' Quality of Experience (QoE) for multimedia streaming services in a heterogeneous wireless network environment because asymmetric wireless links are commonly with different transmission characteristics and sensitive to variations. In this paper, we first discuss the design considerations of partially reliable-MPTCP associated with the real-time constraint of multimedia streaming. Then we propose a context-aware QoE-oriented MPTCP Partial Reliability extension (PR-MPTCP+) for providing partially reliable multimedia streaming service to an upper layer protocol. Finally, we evaluate the proposed PR-MPTCP+ solution using a wide range of multimedia quality metrics.