Loss Tolerant Bandwidth Aggregation for multihomed video streaming over heterogeneous wireless networks

Bandwidth aggregation is a key research issue in integrating heterogeneous wireless networks, since it can substantially increase the throughput and reliability for enhancing streaming video quality. However, the burst loss in the unreliable wireless channels is a severely challenging problem which significantly degrades the effectiveness of bandwidth aggregation. Previous studies attack such a critical problem by reactively increasing the Forward Error Correction (FEC) redundancy. Nonetheless, the increased FEC redundancy will impose higher loads on networks and lead to larger end-to-end delays of video streaming. In this paper, we propose a novel Loss Tolerant Bandwidth Aggregation approach (LTBA), which proactively leverages the channel diversity in heterogeneous wireless networks to overcome the burst loss. First, we allocate the FEC packets according to the ‘loss-free’ bandwidth of each wireless network to the multihomed client. Second, we deliberately insert intervals between the FEC packets' departures while still respecting the delay constraint. The proposed LTBA is able to reduce the consecutive packet loss under the burst loss assumption. We carry out the analysis for proving that the proposed LTBA outperforms the existing ‘back-to-back’ transmission schemes in minimizing end-to-end video distortion based on the Gilbert path model and continuous time Markov chain. We conduct the performance evaluation in the Exata and emulation results show that LTBA outperforms existing bandwidth aggregation schemes in handling the burst channel loss as well as in improving the video PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio).