Simulcast transmission for video applications: Performance evaluation with an integrated simulation environment

This paper presents the performance evaluation of a multi-rate multicast protocol named adaptive smooth simulcast protocol (ASSP) for simulcast video transmission. ASSP implements a single rate TCP-friendly protocol as the underlying congestion control mechanism for each simulcast stream. ASSP is built on top of the RTP/RTCP protocol and exploits the RTCP sender and receiver reports for the dissemination of feedback information. 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 finally d) smooth transmission rates that are suitable for multimedia applications. We evaluate the performance of ASSP under an integrated simulation environment, which extends ns-2 and Evalvid-RA into the multicast domain with the use of RTP/RTCP protocols. Simulations conducted under this environment combine the measurements of network metrics along with objective evaluation criteria on the perceived video quality by the end user.