Parallel Data Transfer Protocol
Transferring very high quality digital objects over the optical network is critical in many scientific applications, including video streaming/conferencing, remote rendering on tiled display walls, 3D virtual reality, and so on. Current data transfer protocols rely on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as well as a variety of compression techniques. However, none of the protocols scale well to the parallel model of transferring large scale graphical data. The existing parallel streaming protocols have limited synchronization mechanisms to synchronize the streams efficiently, and therefore, are prone to slowdowns caused by significant packet loss of just one stream. In this chapter, the authors propose a new parallel streaming protocol that can stream synchronized multiple flows of media content over optical networks through Cross-Stream packet coding, which not only can tolerate random UDP packet losses but can also aim to tolerate unevenly distributed packet loss patterns across multiple streams to achieve a synchronized throughput with reasonable coding overhead. They have simulated the approach, and the results show that the approach can generate steady throughput with fluctuating data streams of different data loss patterns and can transfer data in parallel at a higher speed than multiple independent UDP streams.