Video streaming over multi-radio access networks: An access aggregation approach

Nowadays it's common to find the same place covered by multiple access networks. For that reason, mobile terminals are normally equipped with multiple network interfaces, which allow users to take advantage of the heterogeneity of those networks. This paper presents an architecture capable of using, in a simultaneous way, the multiple network interfaces existent in the mobile terminal for accessing a video streaming service. With this goal in mind, a solution on the session layer was developed, allowing the creation of an abstraction layer for the intervening applications. The purposed solution is composed by two modules, responsible for the division and aggregation of the transmitted data through multiple interfaces. The obtained results show that the developed architecture is not only capable of interconnecting two machines through multiple interfaces in a simultaneous way, but it is also capable of processing a video stream division in an intelligent way, accordingly to the network conditions.