Mobile multipath cooperative network for real-time streaming

Access links are often times the bottlenecks of wireless wide area networks (WWAN). The prevalent use of multimedia applications on mobile devices introduces an ever increasing traffic load on WWAN access links, leading to traffic congestion and unsatisfactory user experiences. In this paper, we introduce a mobile multipath cooperative network. In the system, multiple paths are dynamically established among cooperative devices over WWAN and WLAN so that multiple descriptions of a multimedia stream can be transported over distinct end-to-end paths between two mobiles. As a result, the capacities of multiple wireless access links can be utilized to enhance quality of experience of a multimedia application. We also introduce a MDC rate adaptation algorithm that jointly adapts the source coding rates among multiple paths. Our lab experiments show that real-time streaming with multiple description coding benefits significantly from the proposed cooperative network and subsequently enhance the quality of user experience for multimedia applications.