The massive proliferation of wireless infrastructures with complementarycharacteristics prompts the bandwidth aggregation for Concurrent MultipathTransfer (CMT) over heterogeneous access networks. Stream Control TransmissionProtocol (SCTP) is the standard transport-layer solution to enable CMT inmultihomed communication environments. However, delivering high-qualitystreaming video with the existing CMT solutions still remains problematic dueto the stringent QoS (Quality of Service) requirements and path asymmetry inheterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we advance the state of the artby introducing video distortion into the decision process of multipath datatransfer. The proposed Distortion-Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT-DA)solution includes three phases: 1) per-path status estimation and congestioncontrol; 2) quality-optimal video flow rate allocation; 3) delay and losscontrolled data retransmission. The term `flow rate allocation' indicatesdynamically picking appropriate access networks and assigning the transmissionrates. We analytically formulate the data distribution over multiplecommunication paths to minimize the end-to-end video distortion and derive thesolution based on the utility maximization theory. The performance of theproposed CMT-DA is evaluated through extensive semi-physical emulations inExata involving H.264 video streaming. Experimental results show that CMT-DAoutperforms the reference schemes in terms of video PSNR (Peak Signal-to-NoiseRatio), goodput, and inter-packet delay.
展开▼
