QoS-supporting video streaming system with minimum data service cost over heterogeneous wireless networks

This paper presents a video streaming system that supports quality-of-service by effectively consolidating multiple physical paths in a cost-effective way over heterogeneous wireless networks. In the proposed system, the fountain encoding symbols of compressed video data are transmitted through multiple physical paths concurrently to overcome the limitation of single path transmission and harmonize multiple physical paths with diverse characteristics effectively, and the number of transmitted packets is determined by considering the requested quality-of-service of video streaming and the data service cost. The proposed system is fully implemented in Java and C/C++, and tested over real WLAN and LTE networks. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed system. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.