i-SNG: A cost-effective live news broadcasting system over heterogeneous wireless networks

Live satellite news gathering services, featuring real-time streaming of high-quality video, are typically enabled via expensive SNG vehicles and satellite transmissions by TV news companies. With advances in broadband wireless access technologies, delivering live news broadcasting service over broadband wireless networks will become a reality. However, LNB services demand high video fidelity and may consume excessive uplink bandwidth in wireless networks. In addition, the channel condition of terrestrial wireless links between mobile nodes and base stations may vary with time and location, rendering quality of service for LNB services unstable, which is most undesirable to TV news companies. In this article, we share our experience of implementing a novel, cost-effective system called i-SNG for LNB services, under deployment for an M-Taiwan project by a TV company in Taiwan. Specifically, we aggregate bandwidth from locally available heterogeneous wireless networks by employing multilink SCTP, together with Concurrent Multipath Transfer, to cope with limitations in today's network environments. We then perform experiments over a test-bed with different network settings. The experimental results show that, compared with existing solutions, the proposed i-SNG system has superior performance in terms of higher throughput and better perceptual quality, making it an excellent solution for cost-effective LNB services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses SCTP-based CMT for bandwidth aggregation in real-time video transmissions.