StreamCom - Commercialization of Streamed Information

Abstract

StreamCom was another 2nd phase SNF CNEC project. Its main goal was to investigate various problems and issues related to the commercialisation of streamed information. Academic project partners have been EPF Lausanne, as well as the Universities of Geneva, St. Gallen, and Zurich. The RVS group focused on the development of Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for the streamed information such as video streams. The provider of the StreamCom service can establish, modify, and terminate QoS support for unicast or multicast data streams by delivering the corresponding SLA parameters to a bandwidth broker at the adjacent ISP. The bandwidth broker receives and processes these requests and configures the ISP's routers appropriately. StreamCom data are distributed using multicast and, therefore, the Differentiated Services based QoS support must be able to support IP multicast streams. A protocol has been designed on the basis of the bandwidth broker protocol developed in a previous project (CATI) which allows the StreamCom service provider to negotiate the desired service with the ISP's bandwidth brokers. This protocol has been implemented in Java on a content server responsible for video stream transmission and in C++ on the bandwidth broker. A demonstration scenario has been built in the RVS laboratory and successfully been demonstrated at the final project site visit. Two concepts for network usage optimisation in the case of providing QoS to multicast streams have been designed. First, a client authentication mechanism has been introduced, in order to be able to reduce the amount of reservations at runtime to an adequate minimum. Second, a form of measurement based admission control adapted to multicast enables clients to join and leave a running session.

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