Synchronizing Parallel Data Streams via Cross-Stream Coding

Streaming very-high-definition visualization data objects on top of optical networks is critical in many scientific research areas, including video streaming/conferencing, remote rendering on tiled display walls, 3D virtual reality applications, etc. Current data streaming protocols rely on UDP as well as a variety of compression techniques. However, none of the protocols scale well to the parallel streaming model of large scale graphic applications, and the existing parallel streaming protocols have limited synchronization mechanisms to synchronize the streams efficiently, and are prone to be slowed down by just one slow stream. In this paper, we propose a new parallel streaming protocol that can stream synchronized multiple Gbps media content over optical networks through reliable Cross-Stream packet coding, which not only tolerates random UDP packet loss, but also aims to achieve good synchronization performance across multiple parallel data streams with reasonable coding overhead. We simulated the approach, and the results show that our approach can generate steady throughput with fluctuating data streams.