Improving QoE With Genetic Algorithm-Based Path Selection for MPTCP

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a protocol that enables the use of more than one subflow under the same TCP connection, which provides increased throughput due to the aggregated bandwidth. Therefore, the use of MPTCP can be very beneficial to video streaming applications since bandwidth is the most crucial parameter that improves the performance of such applications. However, the characteristics of the subflow paths might have a significant impact on application performance. In this study, we propose a path selection approach for MPTCP subflows in order to maximize the Quality of Experience (QoE) for adaptive HTTP streaming systems, which is currently one of the most popular video streaming application techniques. The paths are selected on the network layer by taking the bandwidth and delay differences into account. The disjointness of the paths is also considered in the proposed path selection approach. A genetic algorithm-based approach is utilized for the selection of the paths. Furthermore, we indicate how the characteristics of the paths affect QoE. The experimental results indicate that considering bandwidth and delay difference parameters jointly helps increase all QoE metrics, compared to the approaches that select paths considering either bandwidth or delay difference.