Real-Time Liquid Wireless Transport for Video Streaming in Rural and Agricultural Applications

Abstract

Wireless networks are essential building blocks of rural broadband. However, rural wireless is subject to both environmental factors and complex, fast-varying network dynamics and uncertainties. Supporting advanced applications with stringent throughput and latency guarantees (e.g., 360 ◦ 4K live streaming for farming observations) in such challenging networks demands whole-stack innovations including those at the transport layer. To this end, we propose the Liquid Wireless Transport Layer (LiqTL) that enables low-latency, data-intensive video streaming services over heterogeneous wireless networks, and, in this work, we focus on the Liquid Processing Module (LiqPM) that leverages the state-of-the-art RaptorQ fountain code to enable real-time, reliable data transport over lossy wireless networks. We implement a baseline prototype of LiqTL in the ARA wireless living lab and deploy a mobile 360 ◦ 4K video streaming application to evaluate its performance. The robustness of LiqTL is evaluated in terms of quality of experience (QoE) through the metric of displayed frames per second (FPS). Our results show that LiqTL over a single path improves the FPS as compared with alternative solutions, and LiqTL over multiple paths can provide a stable performance around 28–30 FPS in challenging environments.