A cooperative packet recovery protocol for multicast video

1998

In order to provide guaranteed QoS multiparty collaborative multimedia applications require reliable transmission of data. The multimedia applications can vary from distributed games, shared whiteboard to interactive video conferencing. These applications often involve a large number of participants and are interactive in nature with participants dynamically joining and leaving the applications[Sudan95]. In order to provide many-to-many interaction when the number of participants is large IP multicast is a very good option for communication. IP multicast provides scalability and efficient routing but does not provide the reliability these multimedia applications may require. Though a lot of research has been done on reliable multicast transport protocol, it really seems that the only way of doing a reliable multicast is to build it for a given purpose like conference control in multimedia conferencing. This paper compares some of the available multicast transport protocols and analyses the most suitable features and functionalities provided by these protocols for a facet of conference control, floor control. The goal is to find or design a reliable multicast transport protocol which would scale to tens or hundreds of participants scattered across the Internet and deliver the control messages reliably.

Proceedings 7th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (Cat. No.98EX226)

Transport of Audio Visual Data is becoming an important application of the IP-based best-effort service in the Internet. We present an error control protocol for provision of a real-time reliable multicast transport service. The protocol RTMC (Real-Time MultiCast) uses Forward Error Correction (FEC) for protecting first transmissions (i.e., proactive error control) and retransmissions. Results of the performance evaluation show that RTMC error control imposes low latency, and is scalable to a large number of receivers.

Proceedings of the IEEE, 2000

Systems designed to provide television quality viewing in peer-to-peer computer networks, and the tools to measure their effectiveness, are now being developed.

1996

This white paper outlines a simple protocol framework that was developed for reliable multicast dissemination of data files. It also provides some historical development and testing history. The general framework described here was originally developed and used by the Image Multicaster (IMM) application within the Internet Mbone for reliable multicast file transfer. This document describes the more general use of the protocol framework as a reliable bulk file transfer technique. We discuss the present operational modes, some performance issues, and the basic application data units (ADUs) used. This is not intended to be a detailed protocol specification document, but rather a broad description of the basic protocol features and a discussion of issues.

Distributed Computing Systems …, 2001

Multicasting of compressed video streams over wireless networks demands significantly different approaches to error control than those used in wired networks, due to high packet loss rate. This paper describes an experimental study of a proxy service to enhance interactive MPEG-I video streams when multicast across wireless local area networks. The architecture and operation of the proxy service are presented, followed by results of a performance study conducted on a mobile computing testbed. The main contribution of the paper is to show that a combination of forward and backward error control is eflective when applied to video streams f o r mobile collaborating users. * This work was supported in part by the NSF grants CDA-9617310.

2007 Next Generation Internet Networks, 2007

The paper reports on recent developments and challenges in reliable multicast communication, with special focus on reliable multicast communication at the application layer. The foundation of reliable multicast communication is given by several components, which are multicast communication, congestion control and error control. Our paper is providing a survey of these mechanisms in multicast environments. I. INTRODUCTION Group communication has emerged as one of the most important developments in Internet. Video conferencing, multimedia distribution, online gaming and long-distance education are today some of the most popular Internet applications, which generate large amounts of traffic. To support these applications, reliable multicast communication is a prerequisite. The purpose is to provide efficient and reliable communication services among a number of users, who are members of a multicast group. Traditional multicast communication demands for the presence of a multicast group, together with associated facilities for reliable multicast communication, to which the users can subscribe and participate. Even though IP multicasting was introduced twenty years ago [14], it is still not widely available as an open Internet service. Problems related to per-group state maintaining, scalability, reliability, congestion control and security have been postponing the wide deployment of IP multicast. On the other hand, other solutions have been developed for multicast service, to compensate for the above-mentioned limitations, e.g., MBone [18]. MBone provides an overlay network, which connects IP multicast capable islands by using unicast tunnel connections. Furthermore, other developments related to, e.g., video distribution and long-distance education, has further pushed the research and development of new alternative solutions for multicast, which are implemented at the application layer. Our paper is a survey on current solutions for multicast communication as well as on solutions for the provision of reliable communication in this context. By reliable multicast communication we mean a type of multicast communication that has included facilities of error and congestion control. The rest of the paper is as follows. Section II provides a survey of multicast communication. Section III presents some This work has been done within the research project "Routing in Overlay Networks (ROVER)", granted in 2006 by the EuroNGI NoE.

IEEE/ACM Transactions …, 1997

Abstract| This paper 1 describes SRM (Scalable Reliable Multicast), a reliable multicast framework for light-weight sessions and application level framing. The algorithms of this framework are e cient, robust, and scale well to both very large networks and very large sessions. The SRM framework has been prototyped in wb, a distributed whiteboard application, which has been used on a global scale with sessions ranging from a few to more than 1000 participants. The paper describes the principles that have guided the SRM design, including the IP multicast group delivery model, an end-to-end, receiver-based model of reliability, and the application level framing protocol model. As with unicast communications, the performance of a reliable multicast delivery algorithm depends on the underlying topology and operational environment. We investigate that dependence via analysis and simulation, and demonstrate an adaptive algorithm that uses the results of previous loss recovery events to adapt the control parameters used for future loss recovery. With the adaptive algorithm, our reliable multicast delivery algorithm provides good performance over a wide range of underlying topologies.

Network congestion affects all users, but real-time multimedia communication is particularly vulnerable. It has been proposed that bandwidth reservation should be used to guarantee a certain quality of service (QoS) for such applications. In order to employ bandwidth reservation effectively, we need to know how much bandwidth a particular application requires. This depends largely on the quality at which different media have to be delivered. Since end-users' perception of quality will determine whether applications are successful, it is essential to establish minimum and maximum media quality required by a particular user group for a particular task. This paper discusses suitable methods and measurements to determine perceived media quality. The design of, and results from, an audio quality experiment illustrate the complexity involved.

2009

With the ever increasing demand of multimedia traffic on the internet the interest in deploying multicast has increased. One hurdle in this regard is quantifying the multicast protocol performance. Many efforts have been put into defining multicast metrics for evaluating protocol performance. In this paper we identified metrics that will provide reasonable measure of protocol's efficiency. The metric is developed keeping two perspectives in mind. First, how efficient a multicast protocol is in utilizing network resources and second, the quality of service it can provide to the end user. A simulation was done using ns-2 to evaluate the performance of multicast protocols based on the metrics we identified. The overall performance of each protocol is calculated and relative efficiency of each protocol is established based on our metrics.

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Design, Deployment, and Evaluation of Network-Assisted Video Streaming

Increasingly, major live events are being delivered using HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which, being a unicast technology, causes such events to generate huge traffic demand peaks on broadband networks which in turn drive significant investment in the network to increase capacity. Multicast ABR (mABR) is a streaming technology that inserts multicast into the path of a unicast HAS stream, allowing the traffic peaks to be reduced while requiring little or no change to the client players. But the unmodified clients continue to behave as HAS clients, asynchronously requesting content segments, adapting the quality of content requested according to perceived network conditions, totally unaware of the use of multicast to deliver synchronously one or more of the available encoded representations of the content to a local proxy. This creates inefficiencies and challenges in system design. Segments delivered synchronously must be cached locally ready for asynchronous requests from the client. Adaptation by the client will cause unwanted segments to be received by multicast, and alternative representations to be requested by unicast. We exploit CDN log data for BT Sport channels delivered by HAS to explore these inefficiencies and challenges. We show that unicast traffic in the core network could be reduced by more than 75% by delivering a single HAS representation by multicast to each client proxy, with larger savings for HD than UHD streams. We show that a cache at the client proxy capable of storing seven segments of 6s duration would be sufficient to be able to satisfy the majority of asynchronous requests from clients. Finally, we evaluate the performance of four policies for a client proxy to join and leave multicast groups in terms of the competing metrics of savings in unicast traffic in the core network and the quantity of data delivered over the access network.