Adaptive QoS-aware multipath congestion control for live streaming

Abstract

Nowadays, the popularization of live streaming bring challenges in providing customized Quality of Service (QoS) and satisfying diverse Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements. Multipath TCP (MPTCP), designed for bandwidth and reliability in aggregating transmission, has the potential to improve live streaming performance with multiple simultaneously transmitting paths. However, the existing multipath congestion control algorithms (CCAs) of MPTCP fail to adapt to diverse network environments and different QoS requirements. We study the problem with extensive experiments to observe the limitations of current multipath CCAs. To tackle these problems and support stable and customized live streaming, we propose ACCeSS, an adaptive QoS-aware multipath congestion control framework. ACCeSS is able to promptly adapt to network changes and QoS requirements with a novel control policy optimization phase. In order to adjust and stimulate improvement on the preferred performance metric, ACCeSS exploits Random Forest Regressing (RFR) method to perform QoS-specific utility function optimization. Besides, ACCeSS is implemented and deployed in a multipath live streaming system. We compare it with other multipath CCAs in the Linux kernel and evaluate their performance in both emulated and real-world networks. It is revealed that ACCeSS outperforms classic multipath CCAs and the state-of-the-art learning-based multipath CCA, with better environment adaptive capability of QoS and higher QoE for live streaming.Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted.Highlights：•It is required for live streaming to provide services with diverse QoE preferences.•MPTCP improves live streaming QoE but with limitations.•Classical multipath congestion control strategies fail to meet diverse QoS needs.•Both online learning and regression-based optimization help to adapt the policy.•Implementation and deployment in a multipath live streaming system improves QoS/QoE.