A Performance Measurement Study of Open Internet Contribution Protocols

Authors:
Ciro A. Noronha, Ph.D. Cobalt Digital Inc.
Adi Rozenberg AlvaLinks
Wes Simpson SMPTE Fellow

Using the public Internet for compressed, contribution-quality, real-time video transport has become commonplace for news, sports, and other real-time applications. Transport protocols are required to deal with the jitter and packet loss that can occur when using the Internet. Some transport protocols are proprietary and closed, and no public information exists about them. Other protocols have open specifications and offer open-source implementations. 

This paper presents a measured comparison between two open Internet transport protocols: Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) and Secure Reliable Transport (SRT). We used a network emulator to simulate impairments such as jitter, packet-reordering, and loss, and compared the protocols based on objective and subjective measures. As a reference, we also tested packet recovery using SMPTE ST 2022-1 FEC, which was used for Internet contribution in prior decades before better protocols became available. 

The results show that both RIST and SRT perform well under low packet loss scenarios, but RIST clearly outperforms SRT under challenging network conditions, such as those encountered when using wireless IP links. 

Read the article in full: A Performance Measurement Study of Open Internet Contribution Protocols 

The original paper was first presented at SMPTE MTS last year and later revised and published in the SMPTE Imaging Journal.