Multipath Media-over-QUIC(MoQ) for Video Conferencing Applications
Z. Zhou (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
F.A. Kuipers – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
G. Smaragdakis – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Nitinder Mohan – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
T. Shreedhar – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
This thesis presents Media over Multipath QUIC (MoMQ), a design that extends Media over QUIC Transport (MoQT) with multipath-aware object delivery. The core contribution of MoMQ is a rule-based mechanism that allows endpoints to install object-to-path mapping rules, enabling relays to schedule media objects across multiple network paths according to application-level delivery preferences. These rules operate on generic object metadata, allowing relays to remain application-agnostic while supporting fine-grained, semantics-aware media distribution.
The motivation for MoMQ stems from the limitations of single-path transport for emerging real-time media applications. High-resolution video, ultra-low-latency cloud gaming, and high-frame-rate video conferencing increasingly approach the performance limits of a single network path. Multipath QUIC provides a standards-compliant transport substrate that can aggregate heterogeneous network resources and improve resilience, making it a necessary building block for future real-time media systems.
However, transport-layer-only multipath scheduling is insufficient to meet the strict latency and quality requirements of real-time media without guidance from application semantics.
MoMQ bridges this gap by exposing a controlled interface through which applications can express delivery preferences, while preserving MoQT’s decoupled relay architecture. As a result, MoMQ can flexibly support diverse real-time applications, including live streaming and video conferencing, without binding relays to specific application logic.
To evaluate the proposed design, this thesis analyzes the stringent requirements of video conferencing under advanced encoding strategies such as Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and derives MoMQ scheduling policies accordingly. A prototype system is implemented and deployed in a real-world multipath environment consisting of a terrestrial WiFi link (representative of typical 4G LTE characteristics) and a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite link. Transport-only baseline measurements confirm that existing multipath schedulers fail to improve upon single-path tail latency, motivating the need for application-level scheduling guidance. Four declarative MoMQ rules addressing P-frame interleaving, reconfiguration avoidance, dependency co-location, and cost-sensitive path preference collectively reduce P99.9 frame completion time by 39% compared to the best single-path baseline and by 63% compared to the best transport-only multipath scheduler, while routing only approximately 8% of traffic over the metered backup path.