MS²: A new real-time multi-source mobile-streaming architecture

Video streaming to mobile users is gaining a tremendous momentum within the communities of both industrial and academic researchers. While the networking technologies continue to evolve, video streaming applications are still prone to constrained bandwidth and also to highly varying network dynamics. This paper addresses these issues and attempts to provide a unique solution by proposing a new multi-source streaming strategy specifically tailored for next generation mobile networks for delivering multimedia services to mobile users. The proposed strategy is dubbed MS², Multi-Source Mobile Streaming, which comprises a set of mechanisms that aim at ensuring seamless, continuous, and smooth playback of video for roaming users, guaranteeing an efficient and fair utilization of network resources while meeting the playback and buffer constraints of the clients, preventing redundant transmissions and minimizing packet reordering. Through various computer simulations, the performance of MS² is then validated. The simulation results are encouraging and exhibit the effectiveness of the adopted MS² architecture.