Evaluation of traffic dispersion methods for synchronous distributed multimedia data transmission on multiple links

We propose a multimedia data transmission method, Multitrack, that achieves high-speed and efficient data transmission between multiple mobile hosts and the Internet. This method enables terminals that have a low-speed link to the Internet to receive and play a high quality streaming video, and mitigates the load on the server. Multitrack is used in a cluster-type network where multiple mobile hosts are connected to each other with short-range, high-speed links. High-speed communication with hosts outside the cluster is realized by using multiple wireless links from each mobile host in the cluster and the Internet in parallel and dispersing data traffic to them. By using Multitrack, users of the hosts in the cluster can see a high quality streaming video by sharing the received multimedia data. However, because of the differences in the bandwidth and the delay, it is important to disperse traffic according to the quality of multiple links in order to offer stable multimedia data transmission. We propose an effective traffic dispersion method for this environment, and evaluate this method and other methods by simulations.