Abstract

Media streaming is getting more and more important in today’s internet. Many Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications like Skype require more than just real-time conferencing, but also stored media streaming. This scope exceeds the limits of TCP (Transport Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and leads to an unfortunate trade-off between delay and data loss (jitter). This thesis first compares the use of TCP, UDP and SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) with respect to real-time conferencing, stored media streaming and possibilities of NAT traversal. The comparison shows that neither TCP nor SCTP are well-suited to do real-time conferencing in the Internet. Therefore, the thesis proposes the use of SCTP encapsulated over UDP. SCTP enables the user to optimize connections to do both, real-time conferencing as well as stored media streaming via the Internet. Second, the proposed solution is implemented and integrated into TomP2P. The implementation was successfully tested in the Internet.