Selective frame discard for interactive video

A mobile terminal equipped with multiple interfaces can achieve a much higher bandwidth by aggregating the bandwidth offered by the individual networks. This helps support demanding applications like interactive video. Often, in spite of bandwidth aggregation, the available bandwidth may be too small to avoid frame loss altogether. Under these circumstances, it may be necessary to selectively discard frames to minimize the effect of their loss on the overall video quality. In this paper, we consider different frame discard algorithms and study their performance in the presence of multiple interfaces. We show through trace driven simulations that attempting to transmit every frame results in severe performance degradation. In particular we show that our proposed algorithm MC-drop outperforms other algorithms in terms of suitably defined metrics that capture overall video quality.