A First Look at Adaptive Video Streaming over Multipath QUIC with Shared Bottleneck Detection

The promises of multipath transport is to aggregate bandwidth and improve resource utilisation and reliability. We demonstrate in this paper that the way multipath coupled congestion control is defined today RFC6359 leads to a sub-optimal resource utilisation when network paths are mainly disjoint, i.e., they do not share a bottleneck. With growing interest to standardise Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC), we implement the practical shared bottleneck detection (SBD) algorithm from RFC8382 in MPQUIC, namely MPQUIC-SBD. We evaluate MPQUIC-SBD through extensive emulation experiments in the context of video streaming. We show that MPQUIC-SBD is able to correctly detect shared bottlenecks over 90% of the time as the video segments’ size increase depending on the Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) algorithm. In non-shared bottleneck scenarios, MPQUIC-SBD results in video throughput gains of more than 13% compared to MPQUIC, which directly translates into better video quality metrics.