Experimental evaluation of youtube performance on MPTCP-based LTE-WLAN integration

Soaring demand for high-quality and data-intensive services such as video streaming pushing the limits of cellular networks. In due time, the bandwidth requirement for these services will exceed the cellular network capacity. Now, it is vital to aggregate cellular (licensed) and WLAN (unlicensed) bands to keep pace with the increasing high bandwidth requirement. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a transport layer protocol which can be used to aggregate available bandwidths of multiple networks at a multi-homed User Equipment (UE). We evaluate the performance of LTE-WLAN Integration(LWI) using MPTCP in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE) of YouTube Ultra-High Definition (UHD) videos in a test-bed. As YouTube server does not support MPTCP, we use an architecture with MPTCP proxy which enables the use of MPTCP services to multi-homed UEs. To analyse the QoE, we have developed an application to search and play the YouTube videos. This application monitors the key performance metrics to evaluate QoE in terms Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Our results show significant improvement in MOS with LWI compared to WLAN or LTE alone. Also, our results indicate that more data is offloaded through Wi-Fi when using lowest RTT (Round Trip Time) scheduler in MPTCP.