KSEF R&D Excellence: Multimedia Streaming Using Overlay Networks

Project Summary The content and service provided by the web have penetrated to every discipline of scientific research. Making information available to a rapidly growing user population with a high service quality is quickly becoming a very important and challenging problem. More recently, distribution of video and audio over the Internet has attracted more attentions. Multimedia streaming brings new challenges to content distribution. The system usually works fine with a small number of users, but quickly becomes inaccessible when the number of users increases. In this project, we propose to use overlay multicast (also known as application-layer multicast) as the basic structure for the streaming task. Rather than letting all users get the multimedia content from the origin server, we establish a delivery tree among the application end points. This will reduce the load on the origin server and can make the streaming content available to a large population. One key problem that has not been solved is the failures or unexpected departures of application end points. Once nonleaf application end points leave the delivery tree, all downstream nodes will be affected. We will investigate the problem and explore various solution approaches. We will design and evaluate fast failure detection and recovery techniques to minimize the disruptive effects of these unexpected events. The direct impact of this research is the development of new algorithms and techniques that will make scalable, high quality multimedia streaming over the Internet a reality. It will develop key technologies for implementing new streaming software and impact every activity involving access to multimedia contents over the Internet. Keywords: Overlay network, multimedia streaming, multicast, failure detection, failure recovery VI