Energy-Efficient Multipath TCP for Quality-Guaranteed Video Over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Prompted by technological advancements in wireless systems and handheld devices, concurrent multipath transfer is a promising solution to stream high-quality mobile videos in heterogeneous access medium. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a transport-layer protocol recommended by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for concurrent data transmission to multi-radio terminals. However, it is still challenging to stream high-quality real-time videos with the existing MPTCP solutions because of the tradeoff between energy efficiency and video quality. To deliver real-time video in an energy-efficient manner, this paper presents a Delay-Energy-quAlity-aware MPTCP (DEAM) solution. First, an analytical framework is developed to characterize the delay-constrained energy-quality tradeoff for multipath video delivery over heterogeneous access networks. Second, a subflow allocation algorithm is proposed to minimize the device energy consumption while achieving target video quality within the imposed deadline. The performance of the proposed DEAM is verified by means of extensive Exata emulations with real-time streaming videos. Evaluation results demonstrate that DEAM achieves appreciable improvements over the reference MPTCP solutions in mobile energy conservation and user-perceived video quality.