Multipath Transport for Adaptive Video Streaming: A Cross-Layer eva‎luation of Performance, Resilience, an‎d Energy Trade-Offs

5/5/2026 12:00:00 AM

Adaptive video streaming over heterogeneous networks faces significant challenges due to fluctuating ban‎dwidth, path outages, an‎d mobility-induced disruptions. Single-path transport protocols often fail to maintain stable Quality of Experience (QoE) under such conditions. This thesis presents a comprehensive cross-layer eva‎luation of multipath transport protocols for adaptive video streaming, focusing on performance, resilience, an‎d energy efficiency. A unified an‎d fully reproducible experimental framework was developed to eva‎luate Multipath TCP (MPTCP), Multipath QUIC (MP-QUIC), an‎d Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) under identical video content, adaptive bitrate logic, an‎d dynamic network scenarios. Unlike prior studies that examine isolated metrics, this work explicitly links transport-layer dynamics with application-level streaming behavior an‎d end-device energy consumption. The results show that multipath transport substantially improves streaming robustness an‎d quality compared to single-path operation, but with protocol-dependent trade-offs. MPTCP achieved the highest average delivered bitrate, providing throughput gains of approximately 18–25% over single-path baselines an‎d 10–14% compared to SCTP, leading to a reduction in total rebuffering time of up to 32%. However, MPTCP exhibited increased latency variability on asymmetric paths. MP-QUIC demonstrated superior latency an‎d recovery performance, reducing 95th-percentile segment delivery latency by 20–28% relative to MPTCP an‎d more than 35% compared to SCTP. Playback recovery after path failures stabilized within 1.2–1.6 seconds for MP-QUIC, compared to 2.1–2.8 seconds for MPTCP an‎d over 3 seconds for SCTP.

خش ويديويي تطبيقي , انتقال چندمسيري , ارزيابي ميانلايهاي

Adaptive video streaming , Multipath transport , Cross-layer eva‎luation

Hayder Salih Mahdi

Dr. Vesal Hakami