Abstract—In spite of massive research efforts devoted to the advance of the technologies for large-scale live distribution of audio-video IP streams, no totally satisfying solutions seem to have emerged so far. CDNs are still expensive and P2P-TV systems face substantial delay limitations. As the deployment of a global terrestrial IP multicast infrastructure still looks far, turning the attention to satellite-based multicast would seem a sensible choice. However, the cost of such technology has been a stumbling block until now. That is where the CHARMS architecture comes in. It is designed to take advantage of the formidable properties of the satellite without requiring a generic user to install any sort of satellite receiver or dish. Its cornerstone is the recursive terrestrial relaying of satellite streams a number of properly equipped hosts are able to receive. The present paper relates about the results of the OpenSatRelaying project, aimed at the implementation and testing of the CHARMS architecture.

Index Terms—Satellite communication, multicast communication, large-scale system, real-time streaming, P2P streaming

Cite: Franco Tommasi, Catiuscia Melle, and Valerio De Luca, "OpenSatRelaying: a Hybrid Approach to Real-Time Audio-Video Distribution over the Internet," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 248-261, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.3.248-261