By: Julie Basa
It’s that time again… Multicast Monday! I just wrapped up my third week at Ramp. It was a great week, and I continue to learn so much. Our customer SAS Institute joined us and Wainhouse Research for a webinar to talk about how they’re saving their network from the increasing demand for internal videos. If you missed it, you can watch the replay here .
The team really
thought of everything when they built Ramp’s enterprise content management
network (eCDN) solutions. In my first blog,
I told you about AltitudeCDN
Multicast+’s
software-defined
networking, security and its ability to work with virtually any video player,
and on April 15
, I talked about its
unparalleled quality and efficiency.
So, this week I thought I’d dive a little deeper to find out what’s so special about our “bandwidth smoothing technologies.” Turns out, we’ve got some really smart developers.
Forward
Error Correction
Forward
error correction—or FEC—is Ramp’s patented method for managing a momentary loss
of data. Multicast+ encodes audio and visual bits by organizing them into
two-dimensional blocks. The blocks contain forward- and backward-predictive
information, helping the decoder reconstruct lost packets. You might be
thinking other solutions do the same thing, but we take it two steps further.
Ramp’s FEC uses data
from longer periods of time than other solutions, so each block contains more
information. Then, we rotate the blocks 90 degrees, so data lost equates to
small chunks from several groups of bits rather than large chunks from a single
set of bits. As a result, packets can be almost fully reconstructed when they
arrive at the decoder.
Heartbeat Monitoring
Imagine
what would happen if your multicast server failed. All of a sudden, your
network would be flooded with individual streams. For the sake of simple math,
if 10,000 people are watching your live stream, you’d have approximately 20,000
mbps of data travelling your network all at once.*
With Multicast+,
you can deploy a high-availability cluster of senders and establish a heartbeat
communication between them. When a missed heartbeat is detected, the functional
sender with the highest priority immediately takes over as the active sender.
This backend process is so transparent to viewers, they won’t even notice.
Ramp’s forward
error correction and heartbeat monitoring are just two ways Multicast+ is one
of the most reliable eCDNs on the market today—even on wireless networks.
Do you
want to learn more about Ramp’s bandwidth-smoothing technologies? Get the details on Multicast+
here
or contact us
today!
*For this calculation, we’re assuming one video stream is equal to 2mbps.
The post Multicast Monday:
Bandwidth Smoothing Technologies
appeared first on Ramp
.