System evaluation of hardware and software for a streaming multimedia server using the multicasting protocol

Abstract

The next step in the evolution of services provided on an intranet or the internet will be distributed or distance learning with collaboration among peers. Currently, this is done on a one-to-one basis. To expand to a one-tomany collaboration environment, there needs to be a server distributing the multimedia content without creating additional network traffic even though many users are accessing or viewing the multimedia content. Multicasting allows many users to view multimedia content without creating additional network traffic. There is a server providing multimedia content to a multicast address so users may access it. This thesis defines metrics and conducts a comparison of different servers capable of distributing multimedia content using the multicasting protocol.