Video Stream Splitting and Merging using Dual Mobile-IP Tunnels in Wireless Handoffs

In this paper, we design and develop a dual-tunnel scheme by setting up a secondary tunnel such that HA can perform load sharing by splitting and redirecting video packets from the primary tunnel to the secondary tunnel when the former encounters extremely high traffic load. The splitting of MPEG-4 video streams is performed progressively based on their frame types, I, B, and P; i.e., splitting B and P-frames first, and followed by even-numbered I-frames. Video receiver at MN will have to merge these divided video packets and then playback the video stream utterly. For the purpose of demonstration, we implement the dual-tunnel schemes on Linux platform. Experiments are conducted with different scenarios of stream splitting by varying the ratio of on-off background traffic. From the experimental results, we prove that the proposed dual-tunnel schemes can significantly improve the quality of video streams even under severe traffic load.