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Quality of service (QoS) in streaming of continuous media (CM) over the Internet is poor, which is partly due to variations in delays, bandwidth limitations, and packet losses. Although CM applications can tolerate some missing data, non-recoverable information loss degrades these applications' QoS. Consequently, a number of application areas (e.g., those related to the entertainment industry) have backed away from streaming of their content over the Internet. Inability to control the resulting visual and auditory quality of the resulting streamed presentation is an important reason for such a trend. We believe that this trend can be reversed. To this end, our work focuses on providing high quality streaming through the exploitation of multiple paths existing in the network. By high quality, we mean with significant bandwidth requirements, of relatively long duration, and without information loss or hiccups in data delivery. In this article, we present evidence that multi-path streaming is a promising approach.Keywords: Multi-path streaming; application-level streaming over the Internet; quality-of-service. What's Our Approach?Quality of service (QoS) in streaming of continuous media over the Internet is still poor and inconsistent. The degradation in quality of continuous media applications, involving delivery of video and audio, is partly due to variations in delays, bandwidth limitations, as well as losses experienced by packets sent through wide-area networks. Although many such applications can continue to operate with some degree of missing data, non-recoverable information loss degrades these applications' quality of service. Consequently, a number of application areas (e.g., those related to the entertainment industry) have backed away from streaming of their content over the Internet. Inability to control the resulting visual and auditory quality of the resulting streamed presentation is an important reason for such a trend.One approach to providing QoS for continuous media applications over the Internet is to use the IntServ model for signaling (e.g., RSVP) and resource reservation in all routers along the streaming path. However, this approach suffers from scalability and deployment problems. In contrast, in our work we investigate the potential benefits of providing QoS guarantees in continuous media delivery through the exploitation of multiple paths existing in the network between a sender (or a set of senders) and a receiver. The basic idea is that continuous media data (such as video) destined for a particular receiver is fragmented into packets and the different packets take alternate routes to the receiver.One advantage of this approach is that the complexity of QoS provision can be pushed to the network edge (an original design principle of the Internet) and hence improve the scalability and deployment characteristics while at the same time provide a certain level of QoS guarantees. There are many other advantages of multi-path (MP) streaming over the Internet -our focus in this articl...

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