Overlay networking makes it easy for users add new network functionalities while keeping existing Internet connectivity intact. This paper introduces SCONE (Service-COmposable InterNEt) as a networking service to facilitate the management of service overlay networking. By looking into the structure of programmable overlay nodes, SCONE provides programmable IP service gateways (PSGs) that ensure high-speed per-flow packet processing for overlay networking. In order to meet the data-rate requirements of various host applications, each PSG is accelerated by hardware packet processing for its data plane. It also leverages the space-efficient pattern matching of entity cloning and provides localized (i.e., de-centralized) services to assist the scalable support for software-defined networking (SDN). An experiment result shows that the proposed PSGs can support high-fidelity overlay networking from both performance and scalability perspectives.

The recent growth in available network bandwidth envisions the wide-spread use of broadband applications such as uncompressed HD-SDI (High-definition serial digital interface) over IP. These cutting-edge applications are also driving the development of a media-oriented infrastructure for networked collaboration. This paper introduces imCast, a high-quality digital media platform dealing with uncompressed HD-SDI over IP, and discusses its internal architecture in depth. imCast mainly provides cost-effective hardware-based approaches for high-quality media acquisition and presentation; flexible software-based approaches for presentation; and allows for economical network transmission. Experimental results (taken over best-effort IP networks) will demonstrate the functional feasibility and performance of imCast.

A new inter-client synchronization framework employing a server-client coordinated adaptive playout and error control toward one-to-many (i.e., multicast) media streaming is discussed in this paper. The proposed adaptive playout mechanism controls the playout speed of audio and video by adopting the time-scale modification of audio. Based on the overall synchronization status as well as the buffer occupancy level, the playout speed of each client is manipulated within a perceptually tolerable range. By coordinating the playout speed of each client, the inter-client synchronization with respect to the target presentation time is smoothly achieved. Furthermore, RTCP-compatible signaling between the server and group-clients is performed to achieve the inter-client synchronization and error recovery, where the exchange of controlling message is restricted. Simulation results show the performance of the proposed multicast media streaming framework.