Distributed & adaptive HTTP streaming

Adaptive streaming with HTTP has become popular in recent years, enabling continuous delivery of live and VOD content without the need for guaranteed bandwidth. It remains however challenging to maintain a smooth quality of experience under tough network conditions especially for bandwidth eater content like High Definition or 3D. In this paper we show that it is possible to both greatly improve the average quality and attenuate the quality variations for a better user experience by leveraging multipath communication requiring no extra bandwidth. We exploit concurrently multiple paths using a CDN compliant distributed streaming infrastructure and standard HTTP range requests and present the results of several network configurations.