An MPEG-4 Compliant Interactive Multimedia Streaming Platform Using Overlay Networks

This paper presents a multimedia streaming platform for efficiently transmitting MPEG-4 content over IP networks. The platform includes an MPEG-4 compliant streaming server and client, supporting object-based representation of multimedia scenes, interactivity, and advanced encoding profiles defined by the ISO standard. For scalability purposes, we employ an application-layer multicast scheme for media transmission using overlay networks. The overlay network, governed by the central entity of the network distribution manager, is dynamically deployed according to a set of pre-defined criteria. The overlay network supports both broadcast delivery and video-on-demand content. The multimedia streaming platform is standards-compliant and utilizes widespread multimedia protocols such as MPEG-4, real-time transport protocol, real-time transport control protocol, and real-time streaming protocol. The design of the overlay network was architected with the goal of transparency to both the streaming server and the client. As a result, many commercial implementations that use industry-standard protocols can be plugged into the architecture relatively painlessly and can enjoy the benefits of the platform.