Empirical Study on Multi-Path Benefits on Interactive Video

The oncoming prosperity of interactive multimedia application triggers significant challenge to current best-effort Internet because of the dynamic and unpredictable available bandwidth, end-to-end delay, and packet loss. Recently, overlay technique has emerged as an approach to help mitigating these problems. In order to understand the potential benefits of using multi-path provided by overlay network to interactive video, this paper examines the performance of two special multi-path deliver schemes - dual-path mesh and dual-path round robin, and compares their metrics of round-trip delay, packet loss, one-way delay jitter to the direct Internet path by analyzing 7 days of data collected from 102 geographically diverse PlanetLab nodes. By mapping the collected data with MPEG-4 coded "Foreman" video sequence, the paper also presents multi-path benefit on peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).