Dynamic multi-path communication for video traffic

Video on demand applications emerge on campus wide networks. Compressed video streams pass switches which do not have any bandwidth reservation mechanism, nor any other mechanism against congestion. The switches, shared among video servers, WWW servers and clients, get easily congested in critical situations, hence the switches drop pockets and the quality of end to end delivery service degrades. To provide soft bandwidth (QoS) guarantees for video, we designed and tested through simulation a dynamic end to end multi-path protocol for video traffic. We compared our dynamic multi path protocol performance with a dynamic single path protocol and the experiments show significant advantages of the dynamic multi-path communication with respect to provision of soft bandwidth guarantees for video traffic. A disadvantage of our approach is the reordering overhead. However, the use of the higher level frame information helps to simplify reordering and the overhead is acceptable