Design and Implementation of a High Quality Video Distribution System using XTP Reliable Multicast

In this paper we present the design and implementation of a novel protocol solution for distributing high quality compressed video streams to multiple receivers across a network. Our end-to-end protocol uses the connection-oriented multicast facility in the next-generation transport, the Xpress Transfer Protocol (XTP). XTP multicast provides in-order, multipoint delivery of packet streams with user-selectable options for enabling control algorithms and managing dynamic group membership in the multicast connection. XTP multicast gives the application exibility in determining the robustness of the communication while insulating the application from managing multipoint delivery. In our design the multicast video application coding need only handle bu ering for end-to-end synchronization. We have implemented our approach and provide performance measurements of this video distribution system in an FDDI network. We evaluate the performance of our system under different compression ratios when delivering a 640-by-480 8-bit color video stream at 30 frames/sec to four receivers.