End System Multicast is a research project at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

. It is a peercasting

Peercasting

Peercasting is a method of multicasting streams, usually audio and/or video, to the Internet via peer-to-peer technology. It can be used for commercial, independent, and amateur multicasts. Unlike traditional IP Multicast, peercasting can facilitate on-demand content delivery.-Operation:It usually...

 system for streaming live, high-quality video and audio to large audiences.

History

The project was founded in 1999. It was used to broadcast numerous events online, including:

• SIGCOMM
  SIGCOMM
  SIGCOMM is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications, which specializes in the field of communication and computer networks. It is also the name of an annual 'flagship' conference, organized by SIGCOMM, which is considered to be the leading conference...
  
   2002 and 2003, NOSSDAV 2004 and INFOCOM
  Infocom
  Infocom was a software company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a relational database called Cornerstone....
  
   2005
• John Kerry's rally at CMU in 2004
• cmuTV
• DARPA Grand Challenge
  DARPA Grand Challenge
  The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for driverless vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense...
  
   in 2004
• RoboCup
  RoboCup
  RoboCup is an international robotics competition founded in 1997. The aim is to develop autonomous soccer robots with the intention of promoting research and education in the field of artificial intelligence...
  
   2005

ESM was also featured at the Intel Developer Forum in 2005.

Current Use

ESM is no longer under active development by researchers at CMU. In 2006, several members of the ESM research group founded Rinera Networks in order to commercialize the ESM technology. In 2008, Rinera Networks changed its name to Conviva.

Technology

ESM uses a peer-to-peer network to distribute video data across all viewers of a video stream. It constructs an overlay tree to distribute data, and continuously optimizes this tree to minimize end-to-end latency. The root of the tree is the source of the broadcast. This is typically the machine that encodes the video data. This machine sends a stream of data packets to the nodes at the first level of the tree. Each of those nodes then forwards the data to the nodes connected to them, and so on, such that all nodes in the system receive the data stream.

Advantages

ESM allows any user with a DSL or broadband

Broadband

The term broadband refers to a telecommunications signal or device of greater bandwidth, in some sense, than another standard or usual signal or device . Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times...

connection or higher to broadcast good quality video to a large number of people. Since it is a peer to peer network, a broadcaster need only broadcast the video to one person for any number of people to view it.

Disadvantages

Due to the nature of peer to peer multimedia networks, skips in playback or buffering can occur.