A Performance Measurement Study of Open Internet Contribution Protocols

Using the public Internet for compressed, contribution-quality, real-time video transport has become commonplace for news, sports, and other real-time applications. Transport protocols are required to deal with the jitter and packet loss that can occur when using the Internet. Some transport protocols are proprietary and closed, and no public information exists about them. Other protocols have open specifications and offer open-source implementations. This paper presents a measured comparison between two open Internet transport protocols: The Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) and the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT). We used a network emulator to simulate impairments such as jitter, packet-reordering, and loss, and compared the protocols based on objective and subjective measures. As a reference, we also tested packet recovery using SMPTE ST 2022–1 FEC, which was used in the early days for Internet contribution before better protocols became available. The results show that both RIST and SRT perform well under low packet loss scenarios, but RIST clearly outperforms SRT under challenging network conditions.

Published

2025-10-13

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

contribution over the internet, rist, srt, protocol performance measurement, network emulation

ISBN

978-1-61482-966-9