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 handle jitter and packet loss that can occur when using the internet. Some transport protocols are proprietary and closed, with no public information available about them. Other protocols have open specifications and offer open-source implementations. This paper presents a measured comparison between two open internet transport protocols: Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) and Secure Reliable Transport (SRT). We used a network emulator to simulate impairments such as jitter, packet reordering, and loss, and compared the protocols using objective and subjective measures. As a reference, we also tested packet recovery using SMPTE ST 2022–1 Forward Error Correction (FEC), which was used for Internet contribution in prior decades 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, such as those encountered with wireless IP links.

Print ISSN

1545-0279

Electronic ISSN

2160-2492

Published

2026-04

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

rist, srt, protocol performance measurement, network emulation

DOI

10.5594/JMI.2026/YEXQ9772