Multipath live streaming via TCP: Scheme, performance and benefits

Abstract

Motivated by the wide use of TCP for multimedia streaming in practice and the increasing availability of multipath between end hosts, we study multipath live streaming via TCP in this article. We first design a simple and practical TCP-based multipath streaming scheme, named Dynamic MPath-streaming (DMP-streaming), which dynamically distributes packets over multiple paths by implicitly inferring the available bandwidths on these paths. To allow systematic performance study, we develop an analytical model for DMP-streaming and validate the model using extensive ns simulation and Internet experiments. We explore the parameter space of this model and find that DMP-streaming generally provides satisfactory performance when the aggregate achievable TCP throughput is 1.6 times the video bitrate, when allowing a few seconds of startup delay. Last, we comment on the benefits of using multipath versus single path for TCP-based streaming.

References

1. Altman, E., Avrachenkov, K., and Barakat, C. 2000. A stochastic model of TCP/IP with stationary random losses. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM, 231--242.
2. Apostolopoulos, J., Wong, T., Tan, W., and Wee, S. 2002. On multiple description streaming with content delivery networks. In Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (InfoCom).
3. Bohacek, S. 2003. A stochastic model of TCP and fair video transmission. In Proceedings of the Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (InfoCom).
4. Cardwell, N., Savage, S., and Anderson, T. 2000. Modeling TCP latency. In Annual Joint Conference of the Computer and Communications Societies (InfoCom) (3). 1742--1751.
5. Chesterfield, J., Chakravorty, R., Pratt, I., Banerjee, S., and Rodriguez, P. 2005. Exploiting diversity to enhance multimedia streaming over cellular links. In Proceedings of the Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (InfoCom).
6. de Cuetos, P., Guillotel, P., Ross, K. W., and Thoreau, D. 2002. Implementation of adaptive streaming of stored MPEG-4 FGS video over TCP. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia and Expo.
7. de Cuetos, P. and Ross, K. W. 2002. Adaptive rate control for streaming stored fine-grained scalable video. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV).
8. de Souza e Silva, E. and Leao, R. M. M. 2000. The TANGRAM-II environment. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Modeling Tools and Techniques for Computer and Communication System Performance Evaluation.
9. Figueiredo, D. R., Liu, B., Misra, V., and Towsley, D. 2002. On the autocorrelation structure of TCP traffic. Comput. Netw. J.
10. Golubchik, L., Lui, J., Tung, T., Chow, A., Lee, W., Franceschinis, G., and Anglano, C. 2002. Multipath continuous media streaming: What are the benefits? Perform. Eval.
11. Hsieh, H.-Y. and Sivakumar, R. 2002. A transport layer approach for achieving aggregate bandwidths on multi-homed mobile hosts. In Proceedings of the ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom).
12. Jurca, D. and Frossard, P. 2006. Packet selection and scheduling for multipath video streaming. IEEE Trans. Multimedia.
13. Kim, T. and Ammar, M. 2006. Receiver buffer requirements for video streaming over TCP. In Proceedings of the Visual Communications and Image Processing Conference.
14. Krasic, C. and Walpole, J. 2001. Priority-progress streaming for quality-adaptive multimedia. In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Doctoral Symposium.
15. Li, M., Claypool, M., Kinicki, R., and Nichols, J. 2003. Characteristics of streaming media stored on the Internet. Tech. rep. WPI-CS-TR-03-18, Computer Science Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. May.
16. Liang, Y. J., Steinbach, E. G., and Girod, B. 2001. Real-time voice communication over the Internet using packet path diversity. In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference.
17. Mathis, M., Semke, J., and Mahdavi, J. 1997. The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm. Comput. Commun. Rev. 27, 3.
18. Mellia, M., Stoica, I., and Zhang, H. 2002. TCP model for short lived flows. IEEE Commun. Lett. 6, 2.
19. Nguyen, T. P. and Avideh, Z. 2004. Mutiple sender distributed video streaming. IEEE Trans. Multimedia 6, 2, 315--326.
20. Padhye, J., Firoiu, V., and Towsley, D. 1999. A stochastic model of TCP Reno congestion avoidance and control. Tech. rep. 99-02, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
21. Padhye, J., Firoiu, V., Towsley, D., and Kurose, J. 1998. Modeling TCP throughput: A simple model and its empirical validation. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM, 303--314.
22. Rejaie, R. and Ortega, A. 2003. PALS: Peer-to-peer adaptive layered streaming. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV).
23. Ribeiro, B., de Souza e Silva, E., and Towsley, D. 2005. On the efficiency of path diversity for continuous media applications. Tech. rep. 05-19, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
24. Seelam, N., Sethi, P., and chi Feng, W. 2001. A hysteresis-based approach for quality, frame rate, and buffer management for video streaming using TCP. In Proceedings of the Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services.
25. Sharma, V., Kalyanaraman, S., Kar, K., Ramakrishnan, K., and Subramanian, V. 2008. MPLOT: A transport protocol exploiting multipath diversity using erasure codes. In Proceedings of the IEEE Annual Joint Conference of the Computer and Communications Societies InfoCom.
26. Sripanidkulchai, K., Maggs, B., and Zhang, H. 2004. An analysis of live streaming workloads on the Internet. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). 41--54.
27. Tullimas, S., Nguyen, T., Edgecomb, R., and Cheung, S. 2008. Multimedia streaming using multiple TCP connections. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 4, 3.
28. van der Merwe, J., Sen, S., and Kalmanek, C. 2002. Streaming video traffic: Characterization and network impact. In Proceedings of the International Web Content Caching and Distribution Workshop.
29. Verscheure, O., Frossard, P., and Hamdi, M. 1998. MPEG-2 video services over packet networks: Joint effect of encoding rate and data loss on user-oriented QoS. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV).
30. Wang, B., Kurose, J., Shenoy, P., and Towsley, D. 2004. Multimedia streaming via TCP: An analytic performance study. In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia.
31. Wang, B., Wei, W., Guo, Z., and Towsley, D. 2006. Multipath live streaming via TCP: Scheme, performance and benefits. Tech. rep. BECAT/CSE-TR-06-7, Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Connecticut.
32. Wang, B., Wei, W., Guo, Z., and Towsley, D. 2007. Multipath live streaming via TCP: Scheme, performance and benefits. In Proceedings of the ACM CoNEXT Conference.
33. Wang, Y., Claypool, M., and Zuo, Z. 2001. An empirical study of video performance across the Internet. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop.
34. Zhang, Q., Zhu, W., and Zhang, Y.-Q. 2001. Resource allocation for multimedia streaming over the Internet. IEEE Trans. Multimedia. 3, 3.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Modeling and simulation

    • Simulation theory

      • Systems theory

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

• Mathematics of computing

  • Information theory