Exploiting Multi-Link SCTP for Live TV Broadcasting Service

Live SNG (Satellite News Gathering) services, featuring real-time streaming of high-quality video, are typically enabled via expensive SNG vehicles and satellite transmissions by TV companies. In this paper, we design a cost-effective solution to delivering live news broadcasting (LNB) service over emerging broadband wireless access technologies such as WiMAX. However, LNB is a bandwidth hungry service and may consume most of the uplink wireless resource. Besides, the conditions of the shared wireless access between mobile nodes and base stations (BSs) may vary with time and location, which affect the quality of service (QoS) of LNB service. To guarantee the QoS level of LNB service, we implement a novel system called i-SNG which uses multi-link SCTP to glue together more bandwidth from heterogeneous wireless networks such as WiMAX, 3.5G cellular, and WiFi, and to ensure fault tolerance for LNB. We share our experience in constructing an experimental test-bed for our proposed i-SNG system for LNB service. We apply a new multi-link SCTP patch over FreeBSD 7.1 in this test-bed. The experimental results show that i-SNG not only provides a cost-effective solution to LNB service, but also preserves the perceptual quality of LNB video streaming under different network conditions.