MPEG-2 as a transmission system for Internet traffic

MPEG-2 is an international standard defining compression algorithms for video and audio. Additionally, the standard defines a packet and cell oriented transmission system for the resulting digital streams. This system has been used as a local network to carry Internet traffic over a direct broadcast satellite. Applications have been developed for either unicast or multicast services from a base station server to a group of receiving clients. Inexpensive integrated receiver/decoder cards are used which contain a complete RF receiver, demodulator and decoder and interface directly to the PC bus. The paper describes the encapsulation and the implementation of a prototype system based on the European DVB standards which has been operational since early 1997. It then discusses some of the design decisions and suggests a generic encapsulation mechanism for future data and multimedia applications using MPEG-2 as a transport system.