Networked music performance over information-centric networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) constitutes an alternative to the conventional, IP-based, internetworking, with information itself being identified rather than the host where it resides. This approach introduces powerful tools and operations for content delivery, such as native support for multicast. Exploiting this native multicast capability is a very promising approach for multimedia applications such as Networked Music Performance (NMP), where a set of musicians located in different places wish to perform together in real time. While conferencing applications traditionally rely on a Multipoint Conferencing Unit (MCU) that receives media streams from each participant and then retransmits a mixed stream to each one, in NMP we would prefer direct communication between the participants, so as to reduce transmission delays and allow each participant to mix the incoming media streams in the desired manner. In this paper we introduce an ICN-based NMP application exploiting native multicast, and compare its performance with both MCU and non-MCU NMP variants, using both unicast and multicast.