Synchronized Multimedia Streams over SCTP

Over the past few years, the internet has been used to stream multimedia data in real-time over the net to a personal computer. This so-called "streaming" technology, made possible by using RTP over UDP, is both efficient and unreliable. As an alternative, the Internet Engineering Task Force invented the Stream-ControlTransmission-Protocol (SCTP), allowing one to mix unreliable data with reliable data and send this all within one stream. This paper explains how the simultaneous streaming of multiple data sources is already possible today. We have developed a streaming platform and with it a real-time extension to SCTP, the SCTP-Real-Time-Encapsulation (SCTPRTE), that can send data from a number of devices over the net, while defining the quality of reliability for each individual stream. In contrast to conventional streaming techniques such as the Real-Time-Protocol (RTP), we take advantage of the new Stream-Control-Transmission-Protocol (SCTP). Finally, our experiments have shown that SCTP-RTE is able to fulfill the requirements of a modern streaming platform. The performance of our approach is the same as that of RTP/UDP, but with the features of SCTP, this new protocol is more than an alternative for streaming multimedia content over the net.