Cost-Efficient Framework for Mobile Video Streaming using multi-Path TCP

Video streaming has become one of the most popular applications for mobile devices. The network bandwidth required for video streaming continues to exponentially increase as video quality increases and the user base grows. Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP), which allows devices to communicate simultaneously through multiple network interfaces, is one of the solutions for providing robust and reliable streaming of such high-definition video. However, mobile video streaming over MPTCP raises new concerns, e.g., power consumption and cellular data usage, since mobile device resources are constrained, and users prefer to minimize such costs. In this work, we propose a mobile video streaming framework over MPTCP (mDASH) to reduce the costs of energy and cellular data usage while preserving feasible streaming quality. Our evaluation results show that by utilizing knowledge about video behavior, mDASH can reduce energy consumption by up to around 20%, and cellular usage by 15% points, with minimal quality degradation.