A Distributed Multilink Media Transport Approach

The Internet is experiencing a change in paradigm: Once determined by text-based applications, currently, various types of audio-visual content already adopt the major part of the bandwidth. Audio-visual applications and multimedia data impose individual demands on reliability and delivery time, which is not sufficiently covered by available transport protocols. In addition, a more efficient use of network resources such as link bandwidth or the spatial distribution of network routes is essential. This paper evolves the Predictable Reliability under Predictable Delay (PRPD) principle, which is an approach to fit the transport layer parameterization to the requirements of audiovisual applications. The transport parameters are obtained by analytical parameter design including the Gilbert-Elliot channel model. However, not only the application’s constraints but also the underlying network conditions are highly heterogeneous in the unmanaged Internet. We found that deploying our coding scheme on link-level leads to reasonable benefit compared to the commonly used end-to-end protocols. We propose a distributed algorithm for link-individual parameter optimization modeled via the Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP).