UDP-based file delivery mechanism for video streaming to high-speed trains

Through the wide deployment of high-speed rails around the world, multimedia services on high-speed trains will be highly demanded in the near future. However, network round trip time and packet loss rate for high-speed rail reception are much higher and also of high variance. To facilitate the delivery of a live video streaming service, our previous research suggests that the video streaming service is transmitted as a file delivery service and the generated streaming files are delivered via a UDP-based file delivery protocol. In this paper, we investigate the potentials of UDP-based file delivery protocols for high-speed rail reception. We propose Reliable FLUTE (R-FLUTE) for reliable UDP-based unicast file delivery by introducing feedback mechanisms into the IETF FLUTE protocol. To get higher throughput and better network utilization, we extend R-FLUTE to support multisession delivery and propose an adaptive session-based rate control mechanism. We further conduct our experiments on a real 802.16e mobile WiMAX network for Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR). The results show that the proposed scheme in comparison with FTP can provide more stable throughput, thereby requiring smaller buffer level in receivers (i.e., can deliver more real-time live video to receivers).