Elimination of data copying for multimedia communication

UDP is a reasonable alternative for multimedia communication. Although UDP provides unreliable service, it fits well with the characteristics of multimedia communication. The goal of this paper is to minimize the overhead of UDP for multimedia communication. The overhead of UDP is dominated by per-byte overhead. This paper investigates how to reduce the number of data copying, which is a major component of the per-byte overhead of UDP. We propose a new semantics for the UDP send to eliminate data copying. The implementation of the new semantics has been done in the Linux operating system. Performance measurements show that the new UDP send achieves better throughput (over 30 percent for 4 K bytes packets) than the traditional send. The results also show that the throughput improvement rate gets larger as the packet size grows.