Multipath TCP Video Streaming Hand-Offs on LEO Satellite/5G Cellular Networks

Video streaming makes most of Internet traffic nowadays, being transported over Hypertext Transfer Protocol/Transmission Control Protocol (HTTP/TCP). Being the pre-dominant transport protocol, TCP stack performance in transporting video streams has become paramount, specially with regard to MultiPath Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) innovation and multiple client device interfaces currently available. Recently, Low Orbit Satellite networks have become available as a way to cover remote locations where cellular coverage is spotty at best with Internet access. In this paper, we evaluate video streaming hand-off performance via cellular and LEO links. Such scenario is commonplace in geographical areas where cellular communication is unreliable, such as disaster and conflict torn situations. We provide an extensive analysis of Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) TCP variant, as well as CUBIC when handing off video streams between terrestrial cellular network (5G) and LEO (Starlink) access networks. We use network performance level, as well video quality level metrics to characterize quality of video streaming over TCP variants.