Deadline-aware Multipath Transmission for Streaming Blocks

Interactive applications have deadline requirements, e.g. video conferencing and online gaming. Compared with a single path, which may be less stable or bandwidth insufficient, using multiple network paths simultaneously (e.g., WiFi and cellular network) can leverage the ability of multiple paths to service for the deadline. However, existing multipath schedulers usually ignore the deadline and the influence from subsequent blocks to the current scheduling decision when multiple blocks exist at the sender. In this paper, we propose DAMS, a Deadline-Aware Multipath Scheduler aiming to deliver more blocks with heterogeneous attributes before their deadlines. DAMS carefully schedules the sending order of blocks and balances its allocation on multiple paths to reduce the waste of bandwidth resources with the consideration of the block’s deadline. We implement DAMS with the inspiration of MPQUIC in user space. The extensive experimental results show that DAMS brings 41%-63% performance improvement on average compared with existing multipath solutions.