Simulcast Transmission for Video Applications: Performance Evaluation with an Integrated Simulation Environment

This paper presents the performance evaluation of a
multi-rate multicast protocol named Adaptive Smooth Simulcast
Protocol (ASSP) for simulcast video transmission. ASSP
implements a single rate TCP-friendly protocol as the underlying
congestion control mechanism for each simulcast stream. ASSP is
built on top of the RTP/RTCP protocol and exploits the RTCP
sender and receiver reports for the dissemination of feedback
information. The key attributes of ASSP are: a) TCP-friendly
behavior, b) adaptive per-stream transmission rates, c) adaptive
scalability to large sets of receivers and finally d) smooth
transmission rates that are suitable for multimedia applications.
We evaluate the performance of ASSP under an integrated
simulation environment, which extends ns-2 and Evalvid-RA into
the multicast domain with the use of RTP/RTCP protocols.
Simulations conducted under this environment combine the
measurements of network metrics along with objective evaluation
criteria on the perceived video quality by the end user.