Content-aware interface selection method for multi-path video streaming in best-effort networks

Today's mobile devices are equipped with multiple interfaces to make the connection possible to different type of networks. In order to efficiently utilize the interface capabilities, multi-path streaming can be used. Resource intensive applications can deliver high bitrate streams over multiple paths by cumulating the available bandwidth of the different subpaths. In this paper we propose a multi-path streaming method that chooses a set of paths maximizing the overall quality at the client. While the available paths have different bandwidth, delay and loss probability constrains, the packet distributor must take the video packet importance and the dependencies between packets into account. Transmitting the reference video frames on the most reliable links will decrease the loss probability of important data packets and increase the measured video quality. Both analytical and simulation analysis were performed to examine the behavior of the presented content-aware interface selection model. The results show that the proposed solution provides higher video quality than common scheduling algorithms.