Conflux: A Multi-Homed Adaptive Bitrate Protocol for On-Site Live Video Streaming

On-site, live video streaming is an important application that many depend on to receive entertainment and local and international news. Streaming live video over wireless (e.g., 3G, LTE, 5G) has begun to replace television production vans that use direct microwave links to the television station since they offer greater physical flexibility and have shorter setup times. In this method, several links are often aggregated together to stream video. Efficiently using multiple links for live, adaptive video streaming is challenging because a protocol must determine the amount of data to send on each link, the video bitrate, and the appropriate level of redundancy so that video frames can be delivered within the user’s strict latency requirements. In this paper, we present Conflux: a multi-homed, adaptive video bitrate protocol for live video streaming. Conflux’s main contribution is the design of a modular live video streaming platform that supports multipath scheduling, video bitrate adaption, and adaptive Forward Error Correction. Conflux presents a probabilistic link quality model that is used in conjunction with a user-specific utility function to determine the video bitrate and redundancy levels that maximize the user’s expected utility. These models are contained in separate modules which serve as building blocks to create customized, multi-homed adaptive video bitrate protocols for users with different requirements. Our experimental results show that Conflux provides more than 22% improvement in video quality over other multi-homed systems for typical, two-link network environments and as much as 108% improvement in more challenging network environments with up to five links.