HyMTO: The Hybrid Mesh/Tree Overlay for Large Scale Multimedia Interactive Applications over the Internet

In the large scale multimedia interactive applications over the Internet, data can be categorized into the streaming data (e.g. the audio and the video streaming) and the sporadic data (e.g. the annotation in a whiteboard). The mesh-pull overlay fits for the streaming data, for it is resilient in heterogeneous network, while the tree-push overlay is more suitable for the sporadic data, for its easy-to-manage structure can solve the problem of packet loss and disorder. To address the transmission of both types of data, a Hybrid Mesh/Tree Overlay (HyMTO) is proposed in this paper, where the sporadic data and the streaming data are transmitted through different overlays with a novel synchronous scheme. HyMTO can provide the resilient, reliable and ordered transmission for both types of data respectively. Simulations are presented to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of HyMTO and a practical e-conference system based on HyMTO is implemented and deployed to demonstrate its practicability and reasonability.