Scalable and reliable overlay multicast network for live media streaming

Abstract

We have implemented and tested an overlay multicast solution with scalability and reliability that is suitable for a single source live stream distribution such as an IP broadcast service. Our presented solution is independent of a specific streaming server or streaming data and it can distribute multicast data to isolated multicast networks through an unicast tunneling. In order to solve the problems of the peer-to-peer based solutions, we employed dedicated hardware-based solution. We also adopted subnet multicasting to provide scalability so that unlimited number of members could join a multicast group. In the multicast island, the tree depth among the endusers is kept as only one level, which means inherited packet losses can be minimized. To provide reliability, we employ the loosely-coupled TCP connection for unicast-tunneling and FEC (forward error correction) for subnet multicast. We evaluated its performance depending on the bit-rates and PPS (packet per second) of the streams. To verify the efficiency of our solution, we tested it on a real world Internet test-bed and it proved to be more efficient than traditional unicast approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.