Supporting large scale e-Research infrastructures with adapted live streaming capabilities
Syed Faisal Hasan, Laurent Lefèvre, Zhiyi Huang, Paul Werstein · 2008
Large scale e-Research environments face classical distributed challenges: performance, heterogeneous equipment and variable contexts. The users of such infrastructures want to benefit from full interactive environments based on multimedia streams (voice, video, virtual reality) which are difficult to design and support on a large scale basis. In this paper, we present a new approach to support the streaming of live flows between e-Researchers. We show that traditional techniques (using TCP-based live streaming) are unsuitable for infrastructures with long delay and high loss rate. TCP introduces rate oscillations and requires more buffering and bandwidth to sustain a smooth playback. We propose a streaming framework which provides smoother rate control than TCP and improves streaming performance based on crosslayer feedback between the transport protocol and the streaming server. Our solution keeps the buffer usage at the client and server to a minimum level and provides quick rate adaptation. This paper presents simulation results for streaming in different eResearch scenarios.