DISTORTION-AWARE CONCURRENT MULTIPATH TRANSFER FOR MOBILE VIDEO STREAMING IN HETEROGENEOUS WIRELESS NETWORKS

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ABSTRACT:

The massive proliferation of wireless infrastructures with complementary characteristics prompts the bandwidth aggregation for Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) over heterogeneous access networks. Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is the standard transport-layer solution to enable CMT in multihomed communication environments. However, delivering high-quality streaming video with the existing CMT solutions still remains problematic due to the stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements and path asymmetry in heterogeneous wireless networks.

In this paper, we advance the state of the art by introducing video distortion into the decision process of multipath data transfer. The proposed distortion-aware concurrent multipath transfer (CMT-DA) solution includes three phases: 1) per-path status estimation and congestion control; 2) quality-optimal video flow rate allocation; 3) delay and loss controlled data retransmission. The term ‘flow rate allocation’ indicates dynamically picking appropriate access networks and assigning the transmission rates.

We analytically formulate the data distribution over multiple communication paths to minimize the end-to-end video distortion and derive the solution based on the utility maximization theory. The performance of the proposed CMT-DA is evaluated through extensive semi-physical emulations in Exata involving H.264 video streaming. Experimental results show that CMT-DA outperforms the reference schemes in terms of video peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), good put, and inter-packet delay.

INTRODUCTION:

During the past few years, mobile video streaming service online gaming, etc. has become one of the “killer applications” and the video traffic headed for hand-held devices has experienced explosive growth. The latest market research conducted by Cisco Company indicates that video streaming accounts for 53 percent of the mobile Internet traffic in parallel, global mobile data is expected to increase 11-fold in the next five years. Another ongoing trend feeding this tremendous growth is the popularity of powerful mobile terminals (e.g., smart phones and iPad), which facilitates individual users to access the Internet and watch videos from everywhere [4].

Despite the rapid advancements in network infrastructures, it is still challenging to deliver high-quality streaming video over wireless platforms. On one hand, the Wi-Fi networks are limited in radio coverage and mobility support for individual users; On the other hand, the cellular networks can well sustain the user mobility but their bandwidth is often inadequate to support the throughput-demanding video applications. Although the 4 G LTE and WiMAX can provide higher peak data rate and extended coverage, the available capacity will still be insufficient compared to the ever-growing video data traffic.

The complementary characteristics of heterogeneous access networks prompt the bandwidth aggregation for concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) to enhance transmission throughput and reliability (see Fig. 1). With the emergency of multihomed/multinetwork terminals CMT is considered to be a promising solution for supporting video streaming in future wireless networking. The key research issue in multihomed video delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks must be effective integration of the limited channel resources available for providing adequate quality of service (QoS). Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is the standard transport-layer solution that exploits the multihoming feature to concurrently distribute data across multiple independent end-to-end paths.

Therefore, many CMT solutions have been proposed to optimize the delay, throughput, or reliability performance for efficient data delivery. However, due to the special characteristics of streaming video, these network-level criteria cannot always improve the perceived media quality. For instance, a real-time video application encoded in constant bit rate (CBR) may not effectively leverage the throughput gains since its streaming rate is typically fixed or bounded by the encoding schemes. In addition, involving a communication path with available bandwidth but long delay in the multipath video delivery may degrade the streaming video quality as the end-to-end distortion increases. Consequently, leveraging the CMT for high-quality streaming video over heterogeneous wireless networks is largely unexplored.

In this paper, we investigate the problem by introducing video distortion into the decision process of multipath data transfer over heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed Distortion-Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT-DA) solution is a transport-layer protocol and includes three phases: 1) per-path status estimation and congestion control to exploit the available channel resources; 2) data flow rate allocation to minimize the end-to-end video distortion; 3) delay and loss constrained data retransmission for bandwidth conservation. The detailed descriptions of the proposed solution will be presented in Section 4. Specifically, the contributions of this paper can be summarized in the following.

_ An effective CMT solution that uses path status estimation, flow rate allocation, and retransmission control to optimize the real-time video quality in integrated heterogeneous wireless networks.

_ A mathematical formulation of video data distribution over parallel communication paths to minimize the end-to-end distortion. The utility maximization theory is employed to derive the solution for optimal transmission rate assignment extensive semi-physical emulations in Exata involving real-time H.264 video streaming.

LITRATURE SURVEY:

CMT-QA: QUALITY-AWARE ADAPTIVE CONCURRENT MULTIPATH DATA TRANSFER IN HETEROGENEOUS WIRELESS NETWORKS

AUTHOR: C. Xu, T. Liu, J. Guan, H. Zhang, and G. M. Muntean,

PUBLICATION: IEEE Trans. Mobile Comput., vol. 12, no. 11, pp. 2193–2205, Nov. 2013.

EXPLANATION:

Mobile devices equipped with multiple network interfaces can increase their throughput by making use of parallel transmissions over multiple paths and bandwidth aggregation, enabled by the stream control transport protocol (SCTP). However, the different bandwidth and delay of the multiple paths will determine data to be received out of order and in the absence of related mechanisms to correct this, serious application-level performance degradations will occur. This paper proposes a novel quality-aware adaptive concurrent multipath transfer solution (CMT-QA) that utilizes SCTP for FTP-like data transmission and real-time video delivery in wireless heterogeneous networks. CMT-QA monitors and analyses regularly each path’s data handling capability and makes data delivery adaptation decisions to select the qualified paths for concurrent data transfer. CMT-QA includes a series of mechanisms to distribute data chunks over multiple paths intelligently and control the data traffic rate of each path independently. CMT-QA’s goal is to mitigate the out-of-order data reception by reducing the reordering delay and unnecessary fast retransmissions. CMT-QA can effectively differentiate between different types of packet loss to avoid unreasonable congestion window adjustments for retransmissions. Simulations show how CMT-QA outperforms existing solutions in terms of performance and quality of service.

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF PROBABILISTIC MULTIPATH TRANSMISSION OF VIDEO STREAMING TRAFFIC OVER MULTI-RADIO WIRELESS DEVICES

AUTHOR: W. Song and W. Zhuang

PUBLICATION: IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 1554–1564, 2012.

EXPLANATION:

Popular smart wireless devices become equipped with multiple radio interfaces. Multihoming support can be enabled to allow for multiple simultaneous associations with heterogeneous networks. In this study, we focus on video streaming traffic and propose analytical approaches to evaluate the packet-level and call-level performance of a multipath transmission scheme, which sends video traffic bursts over multiple available channels in a probabilistic manner. A probability generation function (PGF) and z-transform method is applied to derive the PGF of packet delay and any arbitrary moment in general. Particularly, we can obtain the average delay, delay jitter, and delay outage probability. The essential characteristics of video traffic are taken into account, such as deterministic burst intervals, highly dynamic burst length, and batch arrivals of transmission packets. The video substream traffic resulting from the probabilistic flow splitting is characterized by means of zero-inflated models. Further, the call-level performance, in terms of flow blocking probability and system throughput, is evaluated with a three-dimensional Markov process and compared with that of an always-best access selection. The numerical and simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of our analysis framework and the performance gain of multipath transmission.

AN END-TO-END VIRTUAL PATH CONSTRUCTION SYSTEM FOR STABLE LIVE VIDEO STREAMING OVER HETEROGENEOUS WIRELESS NETWORKS

AUTHOR: S. Han, H. Joo, D. Lee, and H. Song

PUBLICATION: IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 1032–1041, May 2011.

EXPLANATION:

In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end virtual path construction system, which exploits path diversity over heterogeneous wireless networks. The goal of the proposed system is to provide a high quality live video streaming service over heterogeneous wireless networks. First, we propose a packetization-aware fountain code to integrate multiple physical paths efficiently and increase the fountain decoding probability over wireless packet switching networks. Second, we present a simple but effective physical path selection algorithm to maximize the effective video encoding rate while satisfying delay and fountain decoding failure rate constraints. The proposed system is fully implemented in software and examined over real WLAN and HSDPA networks.

SYSTEM ANALYSIS

EXISTING SYSTEM:

Existing method an effective approach in designing error-resilient wireless video broadcasting systems in recent years, Joint source-channel coding (JSCC) attracts increasing interests in both research community and industry because it shows better results in robust layered video transmission over error-prone channels of various techniques available during these years may be found. However, there are still many open problems in terms of how to serve heterogeneous users with diverse screen features and variable reception performances in wireless video broadcast system. One particular challenging problem of this heterogeneous quality-of-service (QoS) video provision is: the users would prefer flexible video with low quality to match their screens, at the same time; the video stream could be reliable received.

The main technical difficulties are as follows:

  • A distinctive characteristic in current wireless broadcast system is that the receivers are highly heterogeneous in terms of their terminal processing capabilities and available bandwidths. In source side, scalable video coding (SVC) has been proposed to provide an attractive solution to this problem.
  • However, in order to support flexible video broadcasting, the scalable video sources need to provide adaptation ability through a variety of schemes, such as scalable video stream extraction layer generation with different priority and summarization before they can be transmitted over the error-prone networks.

DISADVANTAGES:

  • Existing layered video data is very sensitive to transmission failures, the transmission must be more reliable, have low overhead and support large numbers of devices with heterogeneous characteristics. In broadcast and multicast networks, conventional schemes such as adaptive retransmission have their limitations, for example, retransmission may lead to implosion problem.
  • Forward error correction (FEC) and unequal error protection (UEP) are employed to provide the QoS support for video transmission. However, in order to obtain as minimum investment as possible in broadcasting system deployment, server-side must be designed more scalable, reliable, independent, and support vast number of autonomous receivers. Suitable FEC approaches are expected such that can eliminate the retransmission and lower the unnecessary receptions overhead at each receiver-side.
  • Conventionally, the joint source and channel coding are designed with seldom consideration in heterogeneous characteristics, and most of the above challenges are ignored in practical video broadcasting system. This leads to the need for heterogeneous QoS video provision in broadcasting network. This paper presents the point of view to study the hybrid-scalable video from new quality metric so as to support users’ heterogeneous requirements.

PROPOSED SYSTEM:

We proposed Distortion-Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT-DA) solution is a transport-layer protocol and includes three phases: 1) per-path status estimation and congestion control to exploit the available channel resources; 2) data flow rate allocation to minimize the end-to-end video distortion; 3) delay and loss constrained data retransmission for bandwidth conservation an effective CMT solution that uses path status estimation, flow rate allocation, and retransmission control to optimize the real-time video quality in integrated heterogeneous wireless networks.

We propose a quality-aware adaptive concurrent multipath transfer (CMT-QA) scheme that distributes the data based on estimated path quality. Although the path status is an important factor that affects the scheduling policy, the application requirements should also be considered to guarantee the QoS. Basically, the proposed CMT-DA is different from the CMT-QA as we take the video distortion as the benchmark. Still, the proposed solutions (path status estimation, flow rate allocation, and retransmission control) in CMT-DA are significantly different from those in CMTQA. In another research conducted by a realistic evaluation tool-set is proposed to analyze and optimize the performance of multimedia distribution when taking advantage of CMT-based multihoming SCTP solutions.

ADVANTAGES:

  • We propose a novel out-of-order scheduling approach for in-order arriving of the data chunks in CMT-DA based on the progressive water-filling algorithm. Heterogeneous wireless networks based on fountain code. The encoded multipath streaming model proposed by Chow et al. is a joint multipath and FEC approach for real time live streaming applications.
  • We propose an end-to-end virtual path construction system that exploits the path diversity in heterogeneous wireless networks based on fountain code. The encoded multipath streaming model proposed by Chow et al. is a joint multipath and FEC approach for real time live streaming applications. The authors provide asymptotic analysis and derive closed-form solution for the FEC packets allocation.
  • The major components at the sender side are the parameter control unit, flow rate allocator, and retransmission controller. The parameter control unit is responsible for processing the acknowledgements (ACKs) feedback from the receiver, estimating the path status and adapting the congestion window size. The delay and loss requirements are imposed by the video applications to achieve the target video quality.

HARDWARE & SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

HARDWARE REQUIREMENT:

v    Processor                                 –    Pentium –IV

  • Speed       –    1 GHz
  • RAM       –    256 MB (min)
  • Hard Disk      –   20 GB
  • Floppy Drive       –    44 MB
  • Key Board      –    Standard Windows Keyboard
  • Mouse       –    Two or Three Button Mouse
  • Monitor              –    SVGA

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

  • Operating System        :           Windows XP or Win7
  • Front End       :           JAVA JDK 1.7
  • Tools                                     :           Netbeans or Eclipse
  • Script :           Java Script
  • Document :           MS-Office 2007