Abstract:
The increasing demand for live online classes, especially in remote and underserved areas, underscores the importance of providing a seamless and high-quality experience to support effective learning. These real-time, bandwidth-intensive applications pose significant challenges for current cellular networks in terms of maintaining consistent bandwidth, low latency, and minimal stalls. A system COMPACT tackled these challenges by using a content-aware streaming strategy while leveraging multiple devices, each with its own cellular connection, to cooperatively stream video. COMPACT splits the video into foreground and background regions using independently encoded tiles and streams them over different paths based on network estimates. The original implementation of COMPACT used SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) for multipath support. The key disadvantage of this version was that SCTP is often blocked by firewalls and is not supported by Android. This thesis, therefore, extends the original implementation of COMPACT to utilize QUIC, a modern transport protocol offering built-in multiplexing, reduced latency, and improved congestion control. We adapt COMPACT’s scheduling and streaming logic to work efficiently over QUIC and evaluate the system using realistic network traces. Our results demonstrate that COMPACT over QUIC retains the benefits of multipath collaboration while offering better compatibility with today’s internet infrastructure.
