Experiments of real-time MPEG audio over the Internet

This paper reports the development of an audio-on-demand system operating across the Internet. A shorter version of the report can be found in Ref. 1). The software-only real-time playback system uses the MPEG-1 Audio format as compression method and a client-server architecture was assumed. To ensure the quality of playback under adverse network conditions of the Internet, packet-level interleaving and loss compensation were implemented. Two approaches were taken to test the performance of the system; first by continually trafficking the packets over the Internet and secondly by connecting to a network simulator with suitable competing traffic. The network simulator is very useful in studying the behavior of the system with more control of the desired conditions and without interrupting the actual network. Further work was done to incorporate forward correction codes to improve the performance under severe network congestion.