On the packet similarity of real-time streaming services

Multimedia streaming has recently become a dominant form of Internet traffic. Even in a live streaming environment, however, each end user independently connects to the server by unicast communication. It is thus essential to consider how to provide such services to many users while maintaining efficiency and scalability. To explore the potential of introducing multicast-like transmission mechanisms, we analyze the similarity in streamed data packets that are simultaneously transmitted to several end hosts in real-time video/audio services. The results show a significant level of similarity among the packets and, therefore, that multicast-like mechanisms could decrease streaming traffic.