Performance Analysis of Probabilistic Multipath Transmission of Video Streaming Traffic over Multi-Radio Wireless Devices

Popular smart wireless devices become equipped with multiple radio interfaces. Multihoming support can be enabled to allow for multiple simultaneous associations with heterogeneous networks. In this study, we focus on video streaming traffic and propose analytical approaches to evaluate the packet-level and call-level performance of a multipath transmission scheme, which sends video traffic bursts over multiple available channels in a probabilistic manner. A probability generation function (PGF) and z-transform method is applied to derive the PGF of packet delay and any arbitrary moment in general. Particularly, we can obtain the average delay, delay jitter, and delay outage probability. The essential characteristics of video traffic are taken into account, such as deterministic burst intervals, highly dynamic burst length, and batch arrivals of transmission packets. The video substream traffic resulting from the probabilistic flow splitting is characterized by means of zero-inflated models. Further, the call-level performance, in terms of flow blocking probability and system throughput, is evaluated with a three-dimensional Markov process and compared with that of an always-best access selection. The numerical and simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of our analysis framework and the performance gain of multipath transmission.