Receiver-Assisted Partial-Reliable Multimedia Multipathing Over Multi-Homed Wireless Networks

Yuanlong Cao,Minghe Huang,Hao Wang,Li Zeng,Gang Lei,Qinghua Liu

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2958986

Abstract

With the advancement of multimedia technologies and driven by the ever-increasing user interests in the variety of multimedia applications, the content-rich multimedia streaming services tend to be the most attractive service in future Internet. The multipath TCP (MPTCP), which uses multiple paths for parallel transmission and bandwidth aggregation, is considered to be the most potential transfer mechanism to satisfy the specific requirements of multimedia transmission in a multi-homed wireless network environment. However, the fully-reliable transmission nature of MPTCP can cause an unnecessary retransmission of expired multimedia data, block message from handing over to upper layer, and thus degrade the user-perceived multimedia service quality. In this paper, we propose a receiver-centric partial-reliable multipath transport solution (referred to as $rec$ PR-MPTCP) to support real-time Internet multimedia applications. In the $rec$ PR-MPTCP, a partial reliability extension is presented which runs at receiver side in order to offer a partial reliability multipathing service for multimedia applications. In addition, a new one-way delay-based bandwidth aggregation method is included into the $rec$ PR-MPTCP in order to reduce the receive buffer blocking problem in MPTCP and increase multimedia services performance. Simulation results show that $rec$ PR-MPTCP outperforms the current MPTCP solutions in terms of throughput performance and user-perceived quality of service.

Highlights

With the widespread availability of wireless networking technologies and driven by the ever-increasing user interests in the variety of multimedia applications, the content-rich multimedia traffic tend to account for an overwhelming majority of the world’s internet traffic [1], [2]
This paper proposes a novel receiver-assisted partial reliable multipath transport solution dubbed as recPR-multipath TCP (MPTCP)
The recPR-MPTCP is an extension of MPTCP which runs the partial reliability operations at receiver side in order to (i) provide a partially reliable transmission scheme to MPTCP, and (ii) abandon a certain message at receiver rather than waiting for the decision from the sender

Summary

Introduction

With the widespread availability of wireless networking technologies and driven by the ever-increasing user interests in the variety of multimedia applications, the content-rich multimedia traffic tend to account for an overwhelming majority of the world’s internet traffic [1], [2]. In the meantime, promoted by the advances in various wireless broadband access technologies, modern mobile devices are increasingly being attached more than one wireless network interfaces [6]. These devices can make use of multiple network links to satisfy the specific bandwidth requirements of multimedia transmission in a multi-homed wireless network environment, supported by Multipath TCP (MPTCP) technology [7]. The MPTCP is an extended version of TCP that supports the simultaneous use of several available interfaces for parallel transmission over multiple access links and bandwidth aggregation.

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