A Performance Measurement Study of the Reliable Internet Stream Transport Protocol

The speed and reliability of the Internet has made it possible for broadcasters to use it as a cost-effective low-latency contribution link. Many companies have commercial products providing this functionality, and all of these products are implemented as a variation of the ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) protocol. The Video Services Forum (VSF) has published the TR-06-1 Reliable Internet Stream Transport protocol specification to provide interoperability between such products. The first public demonstration of the protocol was performed during IBC 2018. After a short review of the RIST Specification and of the IBC 2018 demonstration, this paper presents a set of performance measurements for the protocol, using a commercially available RIST encoder/decoder pair, and network simulators to provide various types of signal impairment. The objective of the work is to provide configuration guidelines and performance bounds for broadcasters intending to implement the RIST protocol for contribution applications over the Internet.

This paper will be presented at the Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference during NAB 2019.