Alternative Transmission Strategies for Multipath Transport of Multimedia Streams over Wireless Networks

With the strongly growing popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers, the number of end-systems with more than one network access - like UMTS/LTE and WLAN - is also increasing. This so-called multi-homing also leads to the desire of utilising multiple network paths simultaneously, in order to improve application payload throughput. Clearly, this so-called multi-path transfer feature is also very useful for the transport of multimedia contents, particularly when a single network access alone is not fast enough to fulfil the bandwidth requirements of the application. In many cases, multimedia transport is also sensitive for delays and packet losses. However, the focus of the current multi-path transfer approaches has been on bandwidth only. In order to tackle this challenge, our paper introduces two new send strategies to map payload data to different wireless paths. Finally, by using measurements, we show that a significant performance improvement for delay and loss-sensitive applications can be achieved in comparison to the existing approaches.