FREMONT, Calif.--June 7, 2004--Digital Fountain, a supplier of network transport software, today announced Broadcast, the first commercially available library compliant with Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Reliable Multicast protocols. Broadcast complies with the forthcoming FLUTE (File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport) standard to be published shortly by the IETF. Broadcast is applicable to both wireless broadcast and wired multicast applications deployed by commercial services and enterprise developers. Utilizing Digital Fountain's patented advanced forward error correction technology, Broadcast allows for shorter broadcasts, faster reception and less compute-intensive reception than any other technology across an extremely broad range of network conditions.
"Broadcast accelerates the adoption of Digital Fountain technology in the data broadcast and enterprise multicast market," said Charlie Oppenheimer, President and CEO of Digital Fountain. "With Honda and XM recently endorsing our technology for these kinds of new applications and now having a standards compliant implementation, we are well on our way to taking a leadership position in this market," added Oppenheimer.
The FLUTE Standard
Developed over several years by the Reliable Multicast Transport (RMT) working group of the IETF and including researchers from Digital Fountain, Cisco, Nokia, Microsoft, and others, the FLUTE standard aims to overcome the challenges of broadcast and multicast applications transmitting data to a large population of receivers (or clients) concurrently.
FLUTE is a suite of building blocks that combine to form an overall reliable multicast/broadcast transport solution. The building blocks define packet formats, multi-rate layered data streams, payload identifiers, FEC (forward error correction) identifiers and congestion control. Implementers can choose among the blocks and combine different standards-compliant implementations from different sources. Because these applications are primarily one-way in nature (meaning receivers do not ordinarily communicate back to the sender), FEC technology provides the essential ingredient to achieve reliability.
"Broadcast showcases the power and potential of the forthcoming FLUTE standard," said Dr. Michael Luby, Chief Technology Officer of Digital Fountain and a leading member and author in the IETF RMT working group. "After so much effort, research, and optimization by so many talented people, it will be a delight to see this technology being deployed and used."
Broadcast
Digital Fountain's Broadcast provides a complete FLUTE-compliant network transport solution that can be integrated into any application or platform. Broadcast provides several important capabilities:
Permits Unscheduled and Intermittent Reception
With Digital Fountain's advanced Raptor™ FEC technology, receivers need only collect any set of packets approximately equal in length to the original source data to instantly and perfectly recreate the data. Because there is no need to worry about which packets any particular receiver collects, the data is received quickly and reassembled accurately, even amidst intermittent reception schedules and frequent broadcast interruptions. In addition, because each Raptor-encoded packet is unique, any broadcast or multicast session can continue for as long as necessary without any risk that receivers will receive duplicates.
Low FEC Overhead
Unlike other FEC and data delivery schemes, there is no difference in computational efficiency of the algorithm as the degree of loss increases, there is no need to pre-determine and provision for a maximum packet loss, and there is no need to repeatedly send the same data.
No Limit on Size of Files
Traditional FEC algorithms work well on small-sized data but get computationally expensive as the size of the objects to be broadcast grow larger. With Digital Fountain's FEC technology, performance is linear, regardless of the size of the objects.
Automatic Configuration for Small Memory Receivers
One challenge when multicasting or broadcasting large files is that these files are often larger than the amount of RAM available on the receiver or client. Broadcast determines an optimal segmenting scheme for the RAM footprint of the receiving clients and automatically breaks large files down into smaller sizes and interleaves the Raptor-encoded data for each segment throughout the broadcast/multicast.
Mix and Match Platforms
Any combination of sending and receiving platforms can be employed, and all are mutually compatible for sending and receiving.
Multiple Uncoordinated Senders
Because Raptor-encoded packets are generated at random, it is possible to use multiple senders and allow the receiver to collect any random collection of packets from the different senders without coordinating which packets each sender transmits. This allows for high-availability redundant configurations with the added benefit that receivers can receive at an aggregate rate equal to the sum of the rates of the senders. Another benefit of the multi-sender property for cellular-style broadcast architectures is that there is never a need to coordinate hand-offs between transmitting cells. Instead, every cell can generate a unique set of encoded packets and the receiver can aggregate any collection received from the different cells.
Licensing
Broadcast is available immediately. Libraries are available now or will be available shortly for Windows, Solaris, Linux, VxWorks, Symbian, BREW, WindowsCE and for processors including x86 compatible, X-Scale, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, Hitachi and others as demanded. Digital Fountain offers three types of licenses. A Development License, required to begin development, is available for a flat fee, including one year of consulting and support. Additional license models include an OEM license (for manufacturers, service providers, and software developers) and a Deployment License. For more information, please visit www.digitalfountain.com.