Picture-perfect streaming over the Internet: is there hope?

Quality of service in streaming of continuous media over the Internet is poor, which is partly due to variations in delays, bandwidth limitations, and packet losses. Although continuous media applications can tolerate some missing data, non-recoverable information loss degrades these applications' QoS. Consequently, a number of application areas (e.g., those related to the entertainment industry) have backed away from streaming of their content over the Internet. Inability to control the resulting visual and auditory quality of the resulting streamed presentation is an important reason for such a trend. We believe that this trend can be reversed. To this end, our work focuses on providing high-quality streaming through the exploitation of multiple paths existing in the network. By high quality, we mean with significant bandwidth requirements, of relatively long duration, and without information loss or hiccups in data delivery. In this article we present evidence that multi-path streaming is a promising approach.