Packet Handling and Quality Shaping for Real-Time Services in Futuristic Internet

Abstract

Distributed Media Plays (DMP) is a futuristic architecture for the Internet. It is specifically designed keeping in mind that a number of futuristic Internet services have real-time constraints, particularly the end-to-end delay has to be less than 20 ms. These constraints need to be fulfilled by the network and the current RTP/UDP/IP protocol stack is found to be limited in this regard. Thus an alternative network architecture is proposed and being developed with special, although compatible with IPv6, packets. The handling of these packets in DMP network is explained in this paper. The foundation of DMP system is laid on the quality requirements of the futuristic Internet services. Therefore, one of the features of DMP is that the content quality is gracefully degraded in case the network is overloaded and the traffic injection has to be reduced. This is provided by introducing a scheme for ``Quality Shaping'' which is explained in detail in this paper. Also a new ``Link Flow Control (LFC)'' functionality is introduced in DMP architecture to enhance quality control of contents, which is also explained herein. The LFC functionality helps the DMP network nodes to have an overview of the capacity bottlenecks in the network and hence adjust the traffic flow accordingly.