Scheduling virtual wifi interfaces for high bandwidth video upstreaming using multipath TCP

Live video upstreaming refers to the flow of live data in the upstream direction from mobile devices to other entities across the Internet and has found use in many modern applications such as remote driving, the recent social media trend of live video broadcasting along with the traditional applications of video calling/conferencing. Combined with the high definition video capturing capabilities of modern mobile devices, live video upstreaming is creating more upstream data traffic then what present day cellular networks are equipped to support, often resulting in sub-optimal video experience, especially in remote or crowded areas with low cellular connectivity and no WiFi. We propose that instead of using its single cellular connection, a mobile device connects to multiple nearby mobile devices and splits the live video data over the cellular bandwidth of these devices using Multipath TCP protocol. The use of MPTCP, for upstreaming live video data, has largely remained unexplored especially for scenarios where WiFi connectivity is not available. We use wireless interface virtualization, offered by Linux, to enable Multipath TCP to scale and connect to a large number of cellular devices. We design and build a system that is able to assess the instantaneous bandwidth of all the connected cellular devices/hotspots and uses the set of the most capable cellular devices for splitting and forwarding the live video data. We test our system in various settings and our experiments show that our system greatly increases the bandwidth and reliability of TCP connections in most cases and in cases where there is a significant difference in the throughput across cellular hotspots, our solution is able to recognize and isolate the better performing cellular hotspots to provide a stable throughput.