Flexible media reflection for collaborative streaming scenarios

Abstract

In scenarios where recorded presentations are streamed to a group of clients, users prefer to control streaming on demand and to get content in an individually adapted fashion. IP multicast, the obvious solution for group streaming, cannot provide such a level of flexibility. End-system multicast approaches alleviate the need for multicast routing, but require more powerful clients and are more complex regarding to reconfiguration and inter-client synchronization. The dynamic reflector we propose supports the latter issues by grouping clients with the same play-time position into one reflector session. Individual play-time position changes can be performed by opening new so-called reflector sessions or dynamically switching between them. We provide measurements to show that the latency introduced by the use of a dynamic reflector is low compared to other solutions. Furthermore, we provide scalability enhancements in terms of more efficient network resource usage and delay reduction.