A benchmarking system for multipath overlay multimedia streaming

The rapid growth of the Internet multimedia services brings new challenges to how multimedia streams can be delivered to the users over bandwidth-constraint networks. Different strategies that exploit multipath streaming in order to provide better utilization of the Internet resources have been proposed by the research community. However, there exists no metric that allows us to evaluate how close these strategies are to the optimal resource utilization. This paper proposes a static benchmarking system that models the best possible distribution of streams along multiple paths in an overlay network that is shared by several senders and receivers. We have tested it with several different network topologies, and present the test results in this paper.