Multi-source Mobile Video Streaming: Load Balancing, Fault Tolerance, and Offloading with Prefetching

We present the design and experiments from a testbed implementation of multi-source mobile video streaming that combines three mechanisms: 1) load balancing among different paths from multiple sources, 2) resilience to link and server failures, and 3) enhanced offloading by exploiting mobility and throughput prediction to prefetch video data in caches located at hotspots that the mobile will encounter. Our testbed consists of an Android mobile video streaming client that can utilize both cellular and Wi-Fi interfaces and request different parts of a video from different servers, a server that accepts client requests for parts of a video, and a cache server that accepts client requests to proactively fetch parts of a video so that they are immediately available when the mobile client enters the cache server’s hotspot.