MPR-QUIC: Multi-path partially reliable transmission for priority and deadline-aware video streaming

Video streaming has dominated Internet traffic over the past few years, spurring innovations in transport protocols. The QUIC protocol has advantages over TCP, such as faster connection setup and alleviating head-of-line blocking. Multi-path transport protocols like Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC) have been proposed to aggregate the bandwidth of multiple links and provide reliable transmission in poor network conditions. However, reliable transmission incurs unnecessary retransmission costs for MPQUIC, resulting in deteriorating performance, especially in real-time video streaming. Partially reliable transmission, which supports both reliable and unreliable delivery, may perform better by trading off data reliability and timeliness. In this paper, we introduce MPR-QUIC, a multi-path partially reliable transmission protocol for QUIC. Based on MPQUIC, MPR-QUIC extends unreliable transmission to provide partially reliable transmission over multiple paths. Specific schedulers are designed in MPR-QUIC based on priority and deadline, respectively, for video streaming optimization. Video frames with high priority are transmitted first since frames with low priority cannot be decoded before their arrival. Additionally, to alleviate rebuffering and freezing of the video, as many frames as possible should be delivered before the deadline. We evaluate MPR-QUIC experimentally on a testbed and in emulations. Results show that the rebuffer time of MPR-QUIC is significantly decreased by 60% to 80% when compared to state-of-the-art multi-path transmission solutions. The completion ratio of transmitted data blocks is increased by almost 100%.