MP-ALM: Exploring Reliable Multipath Multicast Streaming with Multipath TCP

In this paper, we present a novel idea of multipath multicast, which is imperative to bandwidth intensive applications, in the context of multimedia streaming. In addition to congestion control, multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been proposed to establish multiple paths in a network to improve network reliability. Application-layer multicast (ALM) has been proposed to leverage end systems instead of dedicated routers to multicast that is important for an easy large-scale deployment as compared to IP-based multicast. This paper presents our novel idea of multipath multicast in the form of a simple experimental framework called MP-ALM in which we combine the multiplicity feature of MPTCP with the application-layer multicast (ALM). We extensively simulate MP-ALM using ns-3 and use iPerf to generate streaming multicast-MPTCP traffic. Simulation results show that MP-ALM can be beneficial for a better user experience and reduced overall network congestion in the perspective of multicast multimedia streaming.