Media transport service for video retrieval applications on ATM networks

In this paper, we define a new approach for implementing the media transport service for video retrieval applications. We present an end-to-end transport protocol called the Video Retrieval Protocol (VRP) for transporting compressed, stored video over a wide-area ATM network to a remotely connected equipment for real-time playback of the transported video stream. VRP is designed to operate over the ABR and VBR+ services of ATM and is targeted for use by next-generation video retrieval applications. The design of VRP is based on the application of three new techniques called spectral filtering, spectral data segmentation and spectral packetizing. We used simulations to assess the performance of VRP as well as that of two existing transport protocols: TCP and UDP. The simulations were driven by a synthetic video stream. The yardstick used to compare the performance of the three protocols was their ability to preserve the perceptual quality of the transported video stream under various network congestion conditions. We show that VRP performs better than TCP and UDP in terms of the overall perceptual quality of the displayed video stream.