Loss Tolerant Bandwidth Aggregation for Multihomed Video Streaming over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Bandwidth aggregation is a key research issue in integrating heterogeneous wireless networks, since it can substantially increase the throughput and reliability for enhancing streaming video quality. However, the burst loss in the unreliable wireless channels is a severely challenging problem which significantly degrades the effectiveness of bandwidth aggregation. Previous studies mainly address the critical problem by reactively increasing the forward error correction (FEC) redundancy. In this paper, we propose a loss tolerant bandwidth aggregation approach (LTBA), which proactively leverages the channel diversity in heterogeneous wireless networks to overcome the burst loss. First, we allocate the FEC packets according to the ‘loss-free’ bandwidth of each wireless network to the multihomed client. Second, we deliberately insert intervals between the FEC packets’ departures while still respecting the delay constraint. The proposed LTBA is able to reduce the consecutive packet loss under burst loss assumption. We carry out analysis to prove that the proposed LTBA outperforms the existing ‘back-to-back’ transmission schemes based on Gilbert loss model and continuous time Markov chain. We conduct the performance evaluation in Exata and emulation results show that LTBA outperforms the existing approaches in improving the video quality in terms of PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio).