Video streaming makes most of Internet traffic nowadays, with most video applications transported over Hypertext Transfer Protocol/Transmission Control Protocol (HTTP/TCP). Being the predominant transport protocol, TCP stack performance in transporting video streams plays an important role, especially with regard to MultiPath Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) and multiple client device interfaces currently available. One overlooked aspect of multipath transport is the management of all possible paths between sender and receiver endpoints. In this paper, we study the usage of all possible paths created by MPTCP vis a vis video streaming performance on wired networking environments. We show that a fullmesh path usage may result in degraded video streaming performance due to common bottlenecks between paths under a simple (default) path scheduler. We then propose a bottleneck aware path scheduler, and show its superior performance on various multipath scenarios. Our results cover both Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip (BBR) propagation time TCP variant, as well as CUBIC variant in transporting video streams over wired networks. We use network performance level, as well as video quality level metrics to characterize quality of video streaming over TCP variants.
Komatsu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.