Design and performance evaluation of in-home high throughput streaming service with ethernet and IEEE1394

This paper introduces a design of the optimized in-home multi-session streaming server and presents a performance evaluation of high throughput multi-session streaming service with Ethernet and IEEE1394. The in-home streaming server is a kind of personal home server or residential gateway, however it is specialized for in-home multi-session streaming and distribution of multimedia contents. In order to realize this server, two specific features should be in harmony with each other: the multi-stream transcoder to support various presentation constraints of the multimedia client devices and the multi-session streaming interface to transfer multiple high-throughput streams concurrently. In particular, the network interface should absorb the throughput tolerance caused by the concurrent stream-converting processes to maximize the multi-streaming capability of the server with a limited transcoder performance. Hence, this paper evaluates the streaming performance of the two major network protocols, gigabit Ethernet and IEEE1394a, in order to understand their adequateness for the in-home multi-session streaming service.