Scalable and reliable overlay multicast network for live media streaming

We have implemented and tested an overlay multicast solution with scalability and reliability that is suitable for a single source live stream distribution such as an IP broadcast service. Our presented solution is independent of a specific streaming server or streaming data and it can distribute multicast data to isolated multicast networks through an unicast tunneling. In order to solve the problems of the peer-to-peer based solutions, we employed dedicated hardware-based solution. We also adopted subnet multicasting to provide scalability so that unlimited number of members could join a multicast group. In the multicast island, the tree depth among the end-users is kept as only one level, which means inherited packet losses can be minimized. To provide reliability, we employ the loosely-coupled TCP connection for unicast-tunneling and FEC (forward error correction) for subnet multicast. We evaluated its performance depending on the bit-rates and PPS (packet per second) of the streams. To verify the efficiency of our solution, we tested it on a real world Internet test-bed and it proved to be more efficient than traditional unicast approaches.