Smart Media Striping Over Multiple Burst-Loss Channels

We consider a community of multi-homed wireless devices, where each device has both a wireless wide area network (WWAN) interface to connect to the Internet and a wireless local area network (WLAN) interface to connect to its neighbors. Suppose users in the community are interested in receiving the same piece of delay-sensitive media content, and are willing to share their network resources. It is obvious that the community can benefit from the bundling of WWAN links and achieve higher aggregate bandwidth that is not possible with a single user with a single WWAN connection. What is not obvious is that by inverse multiplexing or striping packets across multiple WWAN channels, one can also improve the goodput of delay-sensitive media traffic by striping FEC and ARQ packets across available channels. In this paper, we analyze the potential benefits of striping media traffic and develop algorithms that take advantage of these benefits to optimize the delivery of delay-sensitive media streams to a wireless multi-homed device community. Results show dramatic improvement over naive striping schemes such as weighted round robin both in terms of packet loss ratio, and in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio for H.264 video streaming.