A Path-Aware Scheduler for Air-to-Ground Multipath Multimedia Delivery in Real Time

In recent years, multipath techniques have been increasingly used in multimedia transmission because they offer desirable features such as higher throughput and greater reliability. In this work, we focus on the challenging scenario of real-time video streaming from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to a fixed ground control station over multiple wireless paths. We present the development of a lightweight scheduler that is able to dynamically select the paths to be used and determine the necessary redundancy rate to protect the multimedia stream. Our scheduler, implemented as a module of the GStreamer framework, can be deployed in real or simulated environments. The tests show that the proposed solution can target very low loss rates by dynamically adapting both the path selection and the redundancy rate to the variable path conditions, providing an improved performance level compared to other solutions.