A generic architecture for live video transmission

The possibilities for video transmission via the Internet have improved a great deal over the last 2 years. The state of the art in this field is Streaming Video which allows video data to be transmitted via the network in real time and simultaneously displayed. Streaming Video technology is being developed continuously. Our examinations of this technology have shown that special protocols are preferable for real time applications. Technologies such as Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) in particular can make a significant contribution to the Quality of Service provided during video transmission by enabling bandwidth reservation. This paper analyses specific requirements for video-on-demand and those for live transmission. Based on the resulting ideal properties, we propose a generic architecture for a live video server which can be flexibly adapted to various transfer protocols.