ASYMPTOTICALLY OPTIMAL LOAD DISTRIBUTION FOR MULTIPATH STREAMING UNDER FEC

Multipath streaming protocols have recently attracted much attention because they provide an effective means to provide high-quality streaming over the Internet. Most existing multipath streaming schemes also apply forward error correction (FEC) encoding in the stream so as to provide high-quality streaming of prestored or live media content. However, the problem of how to intelligently split the FEC-encoded stream among multiple available paths has not been fully addressed. Most previous work focused on protocol design or heuristic-based engineering approaches. Exact analysis turns out to be hard, as it involves heavy combinatorics computation. In this article, we develop an analytical model and use asymptotic analysis to address the problem of optimal load distribution. Using asymptotic approximations, we propose a closed-form formulation for the optimal load distribution problem. We then develop interesting properties of the optimal solution based on majorization, interchanging argument, and optimization techniques. These results are surprisingly simple yet insightful. We further demonstrate through simulation that our asymptotic solution works quite well in practice.