Internet Multicasting of IPTV With Essentially-Zero Delay Jitter

A technology for multicasting packetized multimedia streams such as IPTV over the Internet backbone is proposed and explored through extensive simulations. An RSVP or DiffServ algorithm is used to reserve resources (i.e., bandwidth and buffer space) in each packet-switched IP router in an IP multicast tree. Each IP router uses an Input-Queued (IQ) switch architecture with unity speedup. A recently proposed low-jitter scheduling algorithm is used to pre-compute a deterministic transmission schedule for each IP router. The IPTV traffic will be delivered through the multicast tree in a deterministic manner, with bounds on the maximum delay and jitter of each packet (or cell). A playback buffer is used at each destination to filter out residual network jitter and deliver a very low-jitter video stream to each end-user. Detailed simulations of an IPTV distribution network, multicasting 75 high-definition video streams over a fully-saturated IP backbone are presented. The simulations represent the transmission of 129 billion cells of real video data and where performed on a 160-node cluster computing system. In the steady-state, each IP router buffers approx. 2 cells (128 bytes) of video data per multicast output-port. The observed delay jitter is zero when a playback buffer of 15 milliseconds is used. All simulation parameters are presented.