An adaptive retransmission‐based multipath transmission mechanism for conversational video

Conversational video service is characterized by high bandwidth demand and low delay requirement. Bandwidth and transmission schemes play an important role in providing high‐quality delivery service for point‐to‐point conversational video service. Multipath transmission is regarded as an effective way to aggregate bandwidth. Transmission schemes need to ensure the strict time relation between information entities and to alleviate the negative impact of packet loss on video quality. To achieve this, existing transmission schemes may incur either a large delay or a large amount of duplicated packets that are not suitable for conversational video service. In this paper, we propose an adaptive retransmission mechanism–based multipath transmission (MT‐AR) for conversational video service delivery. MT‐AR takes advantage of historical reception experience to timely detect packet loss with a certain degree of misjudgement. Receiver requests sender to retransmit the lost packet if the lost packet benefits the decoding. Adaptive playout speed adjustment and alternative path retransmission cooperatively optimize the performance of retransmission. Receiver slightly extends playout speed to reserve time for retransmission and accelerates playout speed to alleviate negative impact of cumulative extension. Multiple paths support to conduct retransmission on an optimal path selected from alternative paths to avoid continuous congestion or error on the original path. Finally, we conduct extensive tests to evaluate the performance of MT‐AR. Experimental results show that MT‐AR can effectively improve the quality of experience of conversational video service by retransmission.