Adaptive Smooth Simulcast Protocol (ASSP) for Video Applications: Description and Performance Evaluation

In this paper, we present Adaptive Smooth Simulcast Protocol (ASSP) for simulcast transmission of multimedia data over best-effort networks. ASSP is a new multiple-rate protocol that implements a single rate TCP-friendly protocol as the underlying congestion control mechanism for each simulcast stream. The key attributes of ASSP are: (a) TCP-friendly behavior, (b) adaptive per-stream transmission rates, (c) adaptive scalability to large sets of receivers and (d) smooth transmission rates that are suitable for multimedia applications. We evaluate the performance of ASSP under an integrated simulation environment which combines the measurements of both network and video performance metrics. We also compare ASSP against other proposed solutions and the results demonstrate that the performance of ASSP is significantly better than the tested solutions. Finally, ASSP is a practical solution with very low implementation complexity for video transmission over best-effort networks