Toward High-Quality Real-Time Video Streaming: An Efficient Multi-Stream and Multi-Path Scheduling Framework

Real-time video streaming requires high throughput and low delivery time for enhanced user’s Quality of Experience (QoE). This motivates the use of multi-path transmission to improve performance. However, ensuring target performance within specified deadlines and priorities for video frames is particularly crucial for real-time communication and video quality, especially in scenarios with limited resources. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">vStreamPth</monospace>, to guarantee high-quality real-time video streaming through multi-path transmission. For essential quality assurance, <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">vStreamPth</monospace> incorporates key requirement indicators that guide the transmission decisions of video frames across predefined multiple paths. In this framework, lightweight and robust decision-making is achieved through the collaboration of application-oriented and network-oriented data scheduling. Specifically, it employs robustness estimation to maintain the non-blocking delivery of frames, and further applies online fine-tuning to correct variations caused by changes in end-to-end transmission and multi-path network conditions. We implement a prototype of <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">vStreamPth</monospace> in Linux user space and conduct a thorough evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the absolute improvement of <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">vStreamPth</monospace> in achieving high QoE and deadline satisfaction ratio compared to existing multi-path solutions.