Improving Multipath Video Transmission With Raptor Codes in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Supported by the latest technical innovations mobile users are able to simultaneously receive real-time streaming services with different radio access technologies (e.g. LTE and Wi-Fi). The stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is a vitally important transport protocol to enable concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) in heterogeneous wireless networks with multihomed terminals. However enabling CMT of real-time video streaming to multihomed mobiles is challenged with key technical dilemmas: 1) high-quality real-time video transmission is constrained by stringent requirements in delay and throughput; 2) wireless networks are bandwidth-limited and error-prone; and 3) the congestion control and packet retransmission modules in the SCTP may incur frequent deadline violations and throughput fluctuations. Motivated by addressing these challenging problems this research proposes a Video and Raptor code aware CMT (CMT-VR) solution. First we develop a mathematical model to formulate the utility maximization problem of multipath real-time video delivery over parallel wireless networks. Second we present a transmission framework that includes online packet scheduling Raptor coding adaptation and retransmission control algorithms. CMT-VR is distinct from the existing SCTPs in leveraging the video frame priority and rateless Raptor coding. The performance verification is conducted by means of system evaluations over real wireless networks and extensive semiphysical emulations in the Exata platform. Evaluation results demonstrate that CMT-VR achieves appreciable improvements over the reference schemes in perceived video quality goodput and end-to-end delay.