Streaming 4K/UHD video to the rest of us: Can bandwidth sharing help?

Abstract

High quality video streaming for mobile users is difficult to achieve in some areas of the world due to poor broadband capacity and sparse network coverage. We propose a bandwidth-sharing scheme to allow users with limited uplink bandwidth to borrow idle bandwidth from nearby access points and provide these users the opportunity to experience higher quality video than what their own bandwidth could normally support. We developed a Linux kernel implementation of a multipath less-than-best-effort (MP-LBE) protocol for bandwidth scavenging and demonstrated, through testbed experiments, that video quality may be improved through bandwidth sharing. This may bring us closer to the `video everywhere' vision even as incremental upgrades are made on broadband Internet infrastructure.