Real-time Audio-Visual Media Transport over QUIC
5 December 2018
/ quic
I gave a presentation at the ACM CoNEXT
Workshop on Evolution, Performance, and Interoperability of QUIC
yesterday, discussing how best to transport real-time traffic over the
emerging QUIC transport protocol.
The paper I presented,
co-authored with
Jörg Ott,
reviews the development of Internet real-time media transport protocols,
looking at HTTP adaptive streaming (e.g., MPEG DASH) and RTP-based media.
It considers the strengths and weaknesses of those protocols, considering
especially features that affect their performance and ease of deployment.
We review some previous proposals for adding datagrams and real-time support
to QUIC, then present the outline of a new design that incorporates the
essential features needed to support real-time into QUIC.
This proposal adds an RT_STREAM abstraction to QUIC, allowing it to
deliver frames of real-time data. We incorporate the concepts of
application-level framing
for robustness against packet loss, and also providing timing and sequencing
information in the media frames. The minimal extensions we propose allow the
receiver to reconstruct media timing and to detect and recover from packet
loss. It also provides the basis for partial reliability and adaptive media
aware congestion control.
The paper
outlines the key design issues, and we expect to submit a more detailed
design document to the IETF for discussion in the next few weeks.