Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery

Abstract

There is growing use of the Internet to deliver television services by unicast. Delivering an individual stream for each viewer causes very popular content to drive large peaks in network traffic, which drives the need for network upgrades just to support the peaks.

We describe Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD), the innovative approach we have developed to use multicast to assist with the unicast delivery of content, allowing content preparation and client applications to remain unchanged while reducing the large peaks in network traffic.

We also describe the trial we have performed with the CDN operator Qwilt where a Raspberry Pi was deployed in the home network of about 90 BT trialists, some of whom used the BT Sport app to request live BT Sport content, while others ran a robot-client on the Raspberry Pi.

Integration with the CDN Operator was straightforward, and analysis of 
performance statistics showed that the system behaved as expected. We 
plan further work towards ultimately deploying MAUD as a network optimisation, cost reduction, technology