MediaFlow: Multicast Routing and In-Network Monitoring for Professional Media Production

IP networks for live TV production have unique requirements such as the ultra high bandwidth and the high sensitivity to packet loss that causes video impairments. Existing multicast protocols are not bandwidth-aware and could cause links to over-subscribe leading to packet loss and negative user quality of experience. Existing video quality error detection tools are reactive by design with no insights into the video domain. In this paper, we introduce
MediaFlow
, a system for bandwidth aware multicast routing, active in-network detection of video errors, and proactive recovery.
MediaFlow
utilizes a novel greedy online multicast routing algorithm for efficient routing and admission control. It also introduces novel per-flow video quality metric utilizing unique switch ASIC capabilities for scalable in-network video quality monitoring and rerouting. We implement
MediaFlow
using data center switches and our testing results confirm that
MediaFlow
algorithm increases fabric capacity up to 60% compared to state of art multicast routing.
MediaFlow
can detect errors in video flow integrity at a granularity of 100 mSec at line rate for thousands of flows. The system can proactively recover impacted flows within 1 sec.
MediaFlow
increases video detection and recovery scale by a thousandfold compared to network edge solutions.