Investigation of MPEG-4 video streaming over SCTP

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol defined in RFC 2960. It was developed by researchers from industry and universities with the focus of transporting telecommunications signaling information over IP based networks. It is a window based, reliable protocol with a congestion control mechanism similar to TCP, but it also has several new features that make it well suited for streaming media content. New features provided by SCTP include multiple streams within an association between two endpoints, bundling of data and control information together in the same packet, and flexible packet delivery (not strictly in order). In this paper we use NS-2 simulation to explore the new features of SCTP and compare the performance with existing techniques for streaming media. We implement our own application in NS-2 that is "SCTP aware" in order to use the SCTP API to take advantage of encoding properties of the MPEG-4 format and attempt to deliver better quality video. We show that in a typical network topology, several features of SCTP can be exploited to deliver more of the MPEG-4 bitstream to the receiver. We conclude that SCTP can potentially provide a significant performance benefit to streaming video applications. Directions for future research are also considered.