Packet Erasure Multi-Channel Model for Video Streaming Applications

Transmission of a video stream over multiple channels is an emerging technology for improving the streaming quality over wireless and best-effort networks. However, these channels might be statistically dependent and may share resources such as bottleneck links, or may cause mutual interference. As a result, the packet loss rate and packet delay over a specific channel can increase while activating additional channels. Modeling such a system without consideration of the negative impact of the channels statistical dependency can lead to underestimation of service performance problems. We suggest a new simple Markov model for multiple channels with statistical dependency. The suggested model captures the performance degradation over the individual channels, while activating multiple channels. Traces of real data are used to confirm the model validity.