Cross-layer scheduler for video streaming over MPTCP
Abstract
Transport protocols that can exploit multiple paths,
especially MPTCP, do not match the requirements of
video streaming: high average transmission delay, too strict
reliability, and frequent head-of-line phenomenons resulting
in abrupt throughput drops. In this paper, we address this
mismatch by introducing a cross-layer scheduler, which
leverages information from both application and transport
layers to re-order the transmission of data and prioritize
the most significant parts of the video. Our objective is to
maximize the amount of video data that is received in time
at the client. We show that current technologies enable the
implementation of this cross-layer scheduler without much
overhead. We then demonstrate the validity of our
approach by studying the performance of an optimal
cross-layer scheduler. The gap between the performance of
the traditional scheduler versus the optimal scheduler
justifies our motivation to implement a cross-layer
scheduler in practice. We propose one implementation with
basic cross-layer awareness. To evaluate the performance of
our proposal, we aggregate a dataset of real MPTCP
sessions and we use video stream encoded with HEVC. Our
results show that our cross-layer proposal outperforms the
traditional scheduler. Viewers not only benefit from the
inherent advantages of using MPTCP (such as a better
resilience to path failure) but also get a better QoE
compared to the traditional scheduler.
Origin | Files produced by the author(s) |
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