Abstract
More and more traffic on the internet is streaming-based. The consumers of these streams are more and more mobile, connected via wireless access points, and used to bandwidth-heavy service. We envision a particular dense situation, like a sporting event, where people might like to watch the same content, at almost the same time. This could be the playback of a specific situation in the game, or some other content, like an important game in another arena. In this work, we investigate whether we can enable shared multicast streams for this content. We design the system with pull-patching for the beginning of the streams, on account of different request times. We design and execute experiments, where we compare our multicast implementation, with the popular unicast-based HTTP Live Streaming created by Apple Inc. The analysis emphasizes bandwidth usage and performance when the situation varies in loss rate and background traffic. We show that multicast, together with pull-patching, greatly reduces the total bandwidth needed to serve the requests. We also show that with enough requests the delivery of the streams breaks down with HTTP Live Streaming, while the multicast version is still operational.