The case for multipath multimedia
transport over wireless ad hoc
networks
學生：王志嘉
指導教授：許子衡 老師
2016/7/13
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Introduction (i)
Ad hoc networks are wireless mobile networks
without an infrastructure, where mobile nodes
cooperate with each other to find routes and relay
packets.
Due to its realtime nature, realtime multimedia
transport has stringent bandwidth, delay, and loss
requirements.
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Introduction (ii)
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is mainly
designed for reliable data traffic. It is not suitable for
realtime multimedia data because
1)
2)
3)
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The delay and jitter caused by TCP retransmissions may be
intolerable.
TCP slow-start and congestion avoidance are not suitable
for realtime multimedia transport.
TCP does not support multicast.
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Introduction (iii)
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP), typically used in
almost all realtime multimedia applications, only
extends the best-effort, host-to-host IP service to the
process-to-process level.
In ad hoc networks, a wireless link have high
transmission error rate because of shadowing, fading,
path loss, and interference from other transmitting
users.
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Introduction (iv)
User mobility makes the network topology change
constantly. The frequent link failures and route
changes cause packet losses and reduce the received
video quality.
To provide an acceptable received video quality in ad
hoc networks, there should be effective error control
to reduce packet losses to a certain level. Traditional
error control techniques, including Forward Error
Correction (FEC) and Automatic Repeat Request
(ARQ)
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Introduction (v)
In this paper examines the problem of using multipath
transport, by which multiple paths are used to transfer
data, for a realtime multimedia session in order to
cope with the above problems, and review related
issues and techniques.
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Multipath Realtime Multimedia
Transport--Application Scenarios (i)
Figure 1 illustrates the general architecture for the
multipath transport of realtime multimedia data, using
video as an example.
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Figure 1
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Application Scenarios (ii)
在sender端一個未經處理的
video，被video encoder進行
第一次壓縮
Video encoder會產生一條被
壓縮的video flow或是多條被
壓縮的video flows
flow會在traffic allocator被
partition和assigned 成多條
path
這些path會利用multipath
routing protocol來通過網路，
來到resequencing buffer進行
儲存
這些video data會從buffer經
由 multi-Stream Decoder再被
解碼出來，進而顯示出來
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Application Scenarios (iii)
The point-to-point architecture in Fig. 1 can be
extended to more general cases. We call this broader
class generalized multipath transport
An architecture for the many-to-one type of
applications is shown in Fig. 2(a), where a node
downloads a video clip from multiple servers in
parallel.
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Fig. 2(a)
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Application Scenarios (iv)
A multicast-based architecture is shown in Fig. 2(b),
where a source multicasts realtime multimedia data to
a group of nodes using two multicast trees
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Advantages of using Multipath Transport
(i)
The advantages of using multipath transport in
wireline and wireless networks have been reported in
many previous works.
First, multipath transport distributes traffic load in the
network more evenly.
Second, multipath transport provides a larger
aggregate capacity for a multimedia session.
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Advantages of using Multipath Transport
(ii)
Third, if a set of disjoint paths are used in multipath
transport, losses experienced by the subflows may be
independent to each other.
Fourth, multipath transport facilitates load balancing
for the servers. As shown in Fig. 2(a), a client can
download video from multiple servers when multipath
transport is used.
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Types of Multipath Routing (i)
The idea of dispersity routing was first presented in
[24] for wireline networks.
There are two types of multiple path routing protocols,
as illustrated in Fig. 3.
A set of braided paths is shown in Fig. 3(a), where
each node maintains a backup path to the destination
node
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Fig.3(a)
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Types of Multipath Routing (ii)
Fig. 3(b) shows two node disjoint paths,i.e., there is no
common nodes between these paths ,except for the
source and destination nodes.
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Fig.3(b)
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Finding Multiple Routes (i)
Many routing protocols designed for ad hoc networks
are multipath routing protocols, such as the
Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA).
Many other protocols are potentially capable of, and
can be extended to, multipath routing, such as the
Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. Ad hoc Ondemand Distance Vector routing and the Zone Routing
Protocol (ZRP)
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Finding Multiple Routes (ii)
For example, when a proactive routing protocol is
used, a node learns the entire topology from the
routing information updates. Then, it can compute the
shortest path and an additional path which is most
disjoint to the shortest one.
The performance improvement achieved by multipath
transport is at the cost of a slightly increased routing
overhead.
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Finding Multiple Routes (iii)
In the proactive routing case, the additional cost is low
since nodes have learnt the topology information.
These additional costs in either computation or traffic
load are limited, and result in better video quality
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Deploying Multiple Routes (i)
If source routing is supported by the underlying
network, the sender can store the entire route in the
headers of multimedia data packets.
Source routing is supported both in IPv4 and IPv6,
and the very popular ad hoc network routing protocol,
DSR, is also based on source routing.
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Deploying Multiple Routes (ii)
If the underlying network do not support source
routing and SCTP, multipath routing can be performed
via an overlay approach, which we call application
level multipath routing.
Multipath routing and packet forwarding can then be
easily implemented in the application layer without
changing the underlying network architecture and
operation
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Transport Layer Protocols for Multipath
Transport
There have been several new transport protocols
proposed to facilitate multipath transport of
multimedia data. A transport layer protocol, called
meta-transmission control protocol (Meta-TCP).
Meta-TCP was designed to focus on general elastic
data transport using TCP. For realtime multimedia
data, the Multi-flow Realtime transport Protocol
(MRTP) support the general architecture using
multiple paths shown in Figures 1 and 2.
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Traffic Partitioning (i)
The traffic partitioning strategy is affected by a
number of factors, such as the auto-correlation
structure of the application data flow,the number of
available paths, and the QoS parameters of the paths.
For stored video, a partitioning technique called
block-based traffic thinning.
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Traffic Partitioning (ii)
With block-based thinning, a video sequence is first
divided into equal-sized blocks of length B.
From the application’s perspective, the blocks consist
of a number of video frames or audio frames or some
other application-specific temporal payload units.
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Multistream Video Coding (i)
The multistream encoder should aim to achieve a good
trade-off between coding efficiency and error
resilience.
One way to generate multiple substreams is to use a
standard video codec and split the resulting bitstream
into multiple substreams.
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Multistream Video Coding (ii)
A simple way to accomplish this is to send the frames
to the paths in a round robin (RR) manner, e.g., all
odd frames are sent to path 1 and all even frames are
sent to path 2.
This method is in fact an option available in the
H.263+ standard (Video Redundancy Coding (VRC))
compared to predicting a frame from its immediate
neighbor, VRC requires significantly higher bit rates.
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Multistream Video Coding (iii)
Natural way of generating multiple streams is by using
layered video coding, which is very useful in coping
with the heterogeneity of user access rates,in network
link capacities, and in link reliability.
The base layer (BL), which includes the crucial part
of the video frames, guarantees a basic display quality.
Each enhancement layer (EL) correctly received
improves the video quality.
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Multistream Video Coding (iv)
Multiple Description Coding (MDC) generates
multiple equally important streams, each giving a low
but acceptable quality.
In designing a MCP-based MD video codec, a key
challenge is how to control the mismatch between the
reference frames used in the encoder and those used in
the decoder caused by transmission errors
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Resequencing Buffer and Delay (i)
Major concern when using multipath transport is the
additional resequencing delay.
Since packets sent on different paths suffer different
delays, they may arrive at the receiver out of order.
The receiver needs to use a resequencing buffer to
temporarily store the received packets and put them in
order.
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Resequencing Buffer and Delay (ii)
In realtime multimedia applications, the resequencing
buffer is mainly used to absorb jitter in arriving
packets.
Such deadlines impose a smaller time window for
multimedia transport and limit the efficacy of
traditional error control schemes, such as ARQ
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Resequencing Buffer and Delay (iii)
A brute force optimization testing all the feasible
combinations of the paths would have exponential
complexity
Using this analysis,the performance metrics can be
translated to the end-to-end delay and the set of paths
can be easily determined with O(N) complexity, where
N is the number of paths available
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Error Control
Multipath transport makes the traditional error control
schemes more effective. One of the most common
FEC codes are Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. RS(n, k)
codes consist of k source packets and n−k redundant
packets.
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Conclusions
In this paper, we review the case for using multipath
transport for realtime multimedia applications in
wireless ad hoc networks.
Path diversity enables effective error control, resulting
in stronger error resilience. These benefits come at the
cost of a limited increase in computational complexity
and traffic load
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