Scalable On-Demand Media Streaming with Packet Loss Recovery
Anirban Mahanti, Derek L. Eager, Mary K. Vernon and David Sundaram-Stukel
In Proceedings of Sigcom 2001
Summary:
The paper presents two scalable protocols for reliable on-demand delivery of streaming media: Reliable Reriodic Broadcast (RPB) and Reliable Bandwidth Skimming (RBS). The design of the new protocols is inspired by the previous works and based on the existing techniques, such as digital foutain approach. By assuming that packet loss can be fully recovered using local error concealment, and each segment must be entirely received before its playback starts, the authors investigate the tradeoff among factors, such as server bandwidth, start-up delay, user bandwidth and packet loss rate. Their results can be used to guide the design and assess the performance of the proposed streaming protocols.
Critique:
This paper is well written. The background session is quite helpful for assisting general audiences to understand the existing representitive schemes, which are also the foundation of the two new protocols.
The protocol is suitable for use in cable or satellite network systems for on-demand media stream distribution. But the reality is that people are spending more and more time on Internet. Internet is getting faster, cheaper and more convenient. With the vast resources in the Internet, on-demand media streaming services are highly desirable. I'm not sure how well the proposed protocols work in a TCP/IP network environment.
Jing Lu