By Santhana Krishnamachari, John Hartung, Junfeng Bai, EGT, Inc.
Deploying video services over IP networks is a significant hurdle because of the stringent requirements on bandwidth, loss rate, and delay jitter imposed by video traffic. Today, most of the video traffic over the Internet and private networks is in the form of data downloads in non real-time, or real-time transmission of low resolution video. Scaling this to a full-resolution high quality video and to a large number of flows continues to be a significant challenge. In this technical case study we present the results of experiments that we have performed to study the feasibility of transmitting broadcast quality video over the Internet. Several point to point communication links were set up with nodes at various geographical locations. Statistics pertaining to video transport, namely available bandwidth, delay jitter, and loss rate were collected over long periods of time. These statistics are presented in this paper and they show that although the network paths are reasonably well behaved for most of the time, intermittent variation in characteristics will require additional techniques such as passive measurement, path diversity, rate adaptation, and error recovery to achieve robust reception.