Tsukada Lab. Computer Network Group
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Designing a Multipath Redundancy Communication Framework for Reliable Real-Time Streaming over 5G

[2023 – 2025]

Developing a multipath framework to improve real-time media quality under fluctuating 5G network conditions by leveraging multiple mobile connections simultaneously.

With the rise of real-time communication applications such as remote conferencing, teleoperation, and cloud-based AR, ensuring consistent and high-quality mobile connectivity has become increasingly critical. Although 5G is positioned as a foundational technology for these services, its performance often fluctuates depending on location, time, and carrier. To address these limitations, our research team has developed a novel multipath redundancy communication framework that enhances the quality of real-time streaming by combining multiple mobile network connections.

Focusing on UDP-based applications like WebRTC, our framework overcomes the limitations of conventional TCP-centric multipath systems. By employing IP-layer tunneling and a receiver-side buffering mechanism for packet reordering, the system maintains smooth real-time playback even across diverse mobile connections. Field tests conducted in urban environments using moving vehicles demonstrated a substantial reduction in packet loss and a significant improvement in bitrate without interfering with application-layer congestion control mechanisms.

In addition to system design, we evaluated the Quality of Service (QoS) of WebRTC-based remote collaboration over real-world 5G conditions. Our experiments analyzed the influence of various environmental and network parameters—such as signal bands, handoffs, and mobility—on media quality. The study also highlighted the potential for performance improvement when utilizing multiple mobile carriers. The collected data has been published openly to support further research on QoS and 5G reliability.

These findings contribute to the broader vision of future-ready mobile infrastructure, supporting use cases like mobile XR, vehicle-to-cloud communication, and emergency response systems. By merging real-time media technologies with adaptive multipath strategies, we aim to create robust, flexible, and high-performance communication platforms for next-generation mobile networks.

Publication

  • A multipath redundancy communication framework for enhancing 5G mobile communication quality
    Ito, Koki, Nakazato, Jin, Fontugne, Romain, Tsukada, Manabu, Esaki, Hiroshi. Computer Communications, pp. 108157, 2025, ISSN: 0140-3664 [Journal Article]BibTeX
  • Enhancing Real-Time Streaming Quality through a Multipath Redundant Communication Framework
    Ito, Koki, Nakazato, Jin, Fontugne, Romain, Tsukada, Manabu, Esaki, Hiroshi. IFIP/IEEE Networking 2024, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2024 [Proceedings Article]BibTeX
  • WebRTC over 5G: A Study of Remote Collaboration QoS in Mobile Environment
    Nakazato, Jin, Nakagawa, Kousuke, Ito, Koki, Fontugne, Romain, Tsukada, Manabu, Esaki, Hiroshi. Journal of Network and Systems Management, vol. 32, iss. 1, 2023, ISSN: 1573-7705 [Journal Article]BibTeX