This report provides a brief overview of several important techniques for media broadcasting and stream merging, as well as a discussion of traditional IP multicast and overlay multicast. Additionally, we present a proposal for a new distribution system, based on the broadcast and stream merging algorithms in the BitTorrent distribution and replication system. | “replication-strategies” — 2007/4/24 — 10:56 — page 1 — #1 Research Report No. 2007:03 Replication Strategies for Streaming Media David Erman Department of Telecommunication Systems, School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, S–371 79 Karlskrona, Sweden “replication-strategies” — 2007/4/24 — 10:56 — page 2 — #2 °c 2007 by David Erman. All rights reserved. Blekinge Institute of Technology Research Report No. 2007:03 ISSN 1103-1581 Published 2007. Printed by Kaserntryckeriet AB. Karlskrona 2007, Sweden. This publication was typeset using LATEX. “replication-strategies” — 2007/4/24 — 10:56 — page i — #3 Abstract Large-scale, real-time multimedia distribution over the Internet has been the subject of research for a substantial amount of time. A large number of mechanisms, policies, methods and schemes have been proposed for media coding, scheduling and distribution. Internet Protocol (IP) multicast was expected to be the primary transport mechanism for this, though it was never deployed to the expected extent. Recent developments in overlay networks has reactualized the research on multicast, with the consequence that many of the previous mechanisms and schemes are being re-evaluated. This report provides a brief overview of several important techniques for media broad- casting and stream merging, as well as a discussion of traditional IP multicast and overlay multicast. Additionally, we present a proposal for a new distribution system, based on the broadcast and stream merging algorithms in the BitTorrent distribution and repli- cation system. “replication-strategies” — 2007/4/24 — 10:56 — page ii — #4 ii “replication-strategies” — 2007/4/24 — 10:56 — page iii — #5 CONTENTS Contents 1 Introduction 1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 Multicast 5 IP Multicast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
