Path diversity and bandwidth allocation for multimedia streaming

The recent advent of widely available broadband Internet access has resulted in an explosive growth of new video streaming applications and research into methods to efficiently support such applications over today’s Internet. Many approaches, including source and channel coding techniques, have been proposed to deal with the delay, loss, and timevarying characteristics of best-effort packet-switched networks. In this paper we present two class of techniques for such networks: the first set of techniques is designed for streaming to receivers with bandwidthlimited last mile connections to the Internet, while the second set explores techniques relying on path diversity to handle situations in which the path to the video source, and not the access link itself, causes degradation in the quality of the video stream. We show results of simulations and Internet experiments, demonstrating the effectiveness of the two techniques.