Multimedia streaming using partially reliable concurrent multipath transfer for multihomed networks

The authors propose a partially reliable-concurrent multipath transfer (PR-CMT) protocol for multimedia streaming. The novelty of PR-CMT is to combine techniques of CMT's concurrent multipath transfer, PR-SCTP's partially reliable transmission and prioritised stream transmission. Moving picture experts group (MPEG) frames are with varying priorities and lifetime. PR-CMT can transmit important frames before other frames but does not transmit lifetime expired frames. The combination of the aforementioned techniques, however, causes imprecise congestion window and receiver buffer blocking problems without suitable control. Consequently, the throughput and video quality degrade. PR-CMT adopts the concept of delay abandoning data to resolve the imprecise cwnd and the receiver buffer blocking problems. The simulation results show that PR-CMT can precisely infer cwnd. Most importantly, PR-CMT can prevent large gaps between two playable frames to have good video quality.