Preventing quality degradation of video streaming using selective redundancy

Video streaming has already become the main portion of data traffic over the Internet. However, it is hard to guarantee the user-perceived video quality in single access networks due to the limitation in available bandwidth. Multihomed systems enable concurrent multipath data transfer over multiple network paths. Path control can be implemented at the transport layer such as in Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP). SCTP has built-in support for multihoming, but offers only a limited standard path selection mechanism. In this paper a new method for video streaming over SCTP is proposed. Secondary paths are used to send redundant information to prevent degradation of viewer’s perceived quality. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by computer simulations using video coded with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding). The results show that the proposed method can prevent degradation of video quality at the cost of small extra bandwidth usage.