Performance Control Of High-Capacity IP Networks For Collaborative Virtual Environments

The support for low latency high throughput IP networks for multimedia streaming is today very limited. This paper shows that in high-capacity Gbps IP networks, RTP/UDP/IP packets of 1500 bytes/packet will achieve extremely low queuing latency (<10ms) and still utilise the network capacity almost 100%. A router must implement a low-complexity algorithm that monitors the queue length and the rate of change of queue length. By sending this information to neighbouring routers and hosts, the traffic can be dynamically controlled to achieve the desired balanced throughput and latency. The only traffic needing QoS controlled channels are these low-rate control messages. The video streams are assumed to include error resilient coding in order to cope with packet losses up to 15 % of the stream, alternatively to scale down the output data rate with the same factor. The low latency of this network make it a very promising network candidate for Collaborative Virtual Environments such as Distributed Multimedia Plays, where distributed musicians and actors can practice and perform live concerts and theatre, provided total latency do not exceed 10ms