Cross-layer DASH-based multipath video streaming over LTE and 802.11ac networks

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over Http (DASH) -based video streaming applications are becoming increasingly prevalent over the mobile Internet. Many efforts have been made to optimize their performances. Multipath video streaming that simultaneously utilizes multiple wireless networks for video content delivery is a common method. Another effective approach is the cross-layer video streaming optimization that jointly takes the parameters at different protocol layers into account. However, multipath streaming schemes mainly focus on how to efficiently utilize multiple wireless networks and the collaboration of parameters at different layers in each network is neglected. Likewise, the cross-layer schemes normally optimize the parameters at different layers in purely one network without fully utilizing the aggregated bandwidths of multiple available wireless networks. Therefore, both of them are sub-optimal and might suffer from degrading performance. In this paper, we propose a joint Cross-layer DASH-based multipath video streaming scheme that takes advantage of bandwidth aggregation of multiple wireless networks and further improves the performance by optimizing the different layers’ parameters in each network with a cross-layer manner. In the proposed scheme, the LTE and 802.11ac networks are adopted. The bitrate of DASH-based video chunk at application layer, the rate allocation among networks and the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) at physical layers in LTE and 802.11ac downlink are jointly optimized. We also compare our proposed scheme to state-of-the-art schemes using trace-driven experiments. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme outperforms state-of-the-art schemes in terms of PSNR, normalized QoE, and balance between video bitrate and rebuffering penalty.