Investigation of MPEG - 4 Video Streaming over SCTP

The Stream Control Transmissionn Protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol definedd inn RFC 2960. It was developedd by researchers from industry andd universities withh the focus of transporting telecommunications signaling informationn over IP basedd networks. It is a window based, reliable protocol withh a congestionn control mechanism similar to TCP, but it also ha s several new features that make it well suitedd for streami ng media content. New features providedd by SCTP include multiple streams withinn ann associationn betweenn two endpoints, bundling of data andd control informationn together inn the same packet, andd flexible packet delivery (not strictly inn order). Inn this pape r we use NS-22 simulationn to explore the new features of SCTP andd compare the performance withh existing techniques for streaming media. We implement our ownn applicationn inn NS-22 that is " SCTP aware " inn order to use the SCTP API to take advantag e of encoding properties of the MPEG-44 format andd attempt to deliver better quality video. We show that inn a typical networkk topology, several feature s of SCTP cann be exploitedd to deliver more of the MPEG-44 bitstream to the receiver. We conclude that SCTP cann potentially provide a significant performance benefit to streaming video applications. Directions for future resear chh are also considered. 1. INTRODUCTION A widely heldd visionn of the Internet of the near future is as a medium of distributionn for film, television, sporting events,