Applicative-layer multipath for low-latency adaptive live streaming

End-users in online video services are sensitive to the overall quality of the video at screen, but also, and more importantly, to other factors, including the latency between the video generation and the playback for live videos. If the improvement of the quality of the perceived video has been well investigated by the multimedia community, the impact of delay, latency, and re-buffering has not received a significant attention. Adaptive streaming technologies, which have been widely adopted in the recent years, contribute to this lack of consideration since vendors usually recommend the introduction of significant extra-latency. In this paper, we address the problem of low-latency live video streaming. We propose an implementation of multi-path video delivery at the applicative level, which exploits the information provided in the latest version of the video delivery standards. We present an implementation of a video player, which takes advantage of multi-path networking to enable video playback using TCP with a latency below 100 ms. By initiating the multi-path delivery from the client side, our mechanism is compatible with current network equipments and does not require any change neither at the server nor in the middleboxes.