On the Efficiency of Path Diversity for Continuous Media Applications

Streaming media over best-effort networks is still an area rich in challenging problems, and many issues remain to be resolved in order to allow the deployment of large scale continuous media content delivery over the Internet. Recent works have addressed methods to cope with the poor quality of service of the Internet due to its best effort service. One promising technique is the use of distinct paths connecting the source and the receiver to achieve better end-to-end loss behavior. One of the main advantages of this technique (called path diversity) resides in the fact that it is neither based on adding redundancy to the original flow nor introducing changes in the current Internet protocols. Using analysis we address four main issues that arise with path diversity. First, we study the performance gains and properties as the number of paths is increased beyond two, and when paths are heterogeneous. Second, we compare path diversity against packet interleaving, which is another technique to reduce the impact of packed losses. We also obtain results when different paths share a common segment. Finally, we investigate the performance of the technique when it is used by many applications that collectively consume a large fraction of the bandwidth available in the paths.