ServerNet and ATM interconnects: Comparison for compressed video transmission

We have developed fully functional Video Server and Client applications which can transmit, receive, decompress and display compressed video over various networks. Our video transport allows dynamic rate control feedback, loss detection, and repair requests from Clients to the Server. Our experiments show how feedback-before-degradation scheme for rate adaptation maintains good display frame-rate for video playback. We show how the playback degradation (reduction in display frame-rate) occurs and what happens if corrective measures are not taken to improve the situation. The degradation is attributed to the increased internal kernel buffering which consumes scarce CPU resources. We demonstrate with our experimental results that ServerNet, with improved hardware delivery guarantees, can significantly reduce host CPU resource consumption while serving video streams. We present the maximum number of streams which can be served for each of ATM and ServerNet interconnects. The appropriate user-level packet sizes for the video server are also determined for each case.