A real-time internet streaming media testbed

We describe a real-time LAN-based testbed that allows us to investigate the behavior of streaming media applications under various network conditions. For commercially available streaming media applications, we are interested to see how they perform over next-generation wireline and wireless networks. For future streaming media applications, the testbed is an invaluable tool for the development and verification of new algorithms. Our testbed implementation is based on Linux Divert Sockets and supports a straightforward integration of various packet erasure and delay models. Individual IP-packets are diverted to a user process where they are delayed or deleted according to the desired channel model. The testbed has been used to investigate the flow-control behavior of existing streaming media systems over wireless networks. Our experiments confirm that flow-control algorithms that consider lost packets to be the result of network congestion, as employed today in wireline streaming, are not suited for wireless networks, where loss is mainly due to link impairments.