NSF Award
9531394
9531394 Noronha This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is aimed at the design, integration and test of a complete system for transporting point-to-multipoint (i.e., one sender, multiple destinations) compressed video streams over traditional computer networks, both in the LAN and in the WAN environments. The advent of MPEG compression has made it possible to encode high-quality video using relatively low bandwidth. This makes it possible to transport video using traditional LAN and WAN technologies. From a transmission technology point of view, the main problems to be solved are error control and latency for interactive applications. The research proposed here will investigate the use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) for error control, and changes in the MPEG encoding scheme to reduce latency. FEC has been chosen because it is scalable to an arbitrary number of destinations, and has little impact in the system latency. Additionally, error concealment techniques will be investigated for occasions where there are uncorrected errors. Session layer protocols and user-interface issues will also be considered, to complete the system design. Commercial applications include video distribution (replacing analog channels), remote teaching, remote surveillance and video conferencing, both in LAN and WAN environments,
