End System Multicast (ESM) was a research project at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
. It developed a
peercasting system for streaming live, high-quality video and audio to large audiences.
History
The project was founded in 1999. It was used to broadcast events online over the internet, including:
[End System Multicast (ESM): About]
." Retrieved May 28, 2007.
*
SIGCOMM 2002 and 2003, NOSSDAV 2004 and
INFOCOM
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
2005
*John Kerry's rally at CMU in 2004
*
cmuTV
*
DARPA Grand Challenge
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorize ...
in 2004
*
RoboCup
RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1996 by a group of university professors (including Hiroaki Kitano, Manuela M. Veloso, and Minoru Asada). The aim of the competition is to promote robotics and AI research by offer ...
2005
ESM was featured at the
Intel Developer Forum
The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) was a biannual gathering of technologists to discuss Intel products and products based on Intel products. The first IDF was held in 1997.
To emphasize the importance of China, the Spring 2007 IDF was held in Beiji ...
in 2005.
ESM is no longer under active development by researchers at CMU. In 2006, several members of the ESM research group founded Rinera Networks in order to commercialize the ESM technology. In 2008, Rinera Networks changed its name to Conviva.
Technology
ESM used a peer-to-peer network to distribute video data across all viewers of a video stream. It constructs an overlay tree to distribute data, and continuously optimizes this tree to minimize end-to-end latency. The root of the tree is the source of the broadcast. This is typically the machine that encodes the video data. This machine sends a stream of data packets to the nodes at the first level of the tree. Each of those nodes then forwards the data to the nodes connected to them, and so on, such that all nodes in the system receive the data stream.
[
]
ESM allowed any user with a
DSL or broadband connection or higher to broadcast good quality video to a large number of people. Since it is a peer to peer network, a broadcaster need only broadcast the video to one person for any number of people to view it.
Due to the nature of peer to peer multimedia networks, skips in playback or buffering can occur.
References
{{Reflist
Other Links ESM Home Page
Carnegie Mellon University
File sharing networks