Multicast distribution of Digital Cinema

In this work, carried out in the framework of the IST Project EDCINE, we present the problem of distributing Digital Cinema (DC) contents through an IP network infrastructure. The first criticality of the system is the huge size of the contents to be transported. This suggests the usage of reliable multicast procedures to save bandwidth at server side and in the network. The other criticality is represented by the download time, which is bounded by a maximum value of few hours specified by Exhibitors. This suggests to reserve network bandwidth to multicast flows to respect this constraint. We present a network architecture based on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) paradigm, which employs reliable multicast procedures to delivery DC contents when the network connecting the CDN mirror with theatres supports multicast. In addition, we address the problem of managing links with high packet error rates. This condition could be frequent in theatres access links of, especially when using wireless distribution technology. We present selected results showing that the IETF protocol NORM, suitably configured to face error prone channels, is a good candidate to accomplish the task of distributing DC contents within a maximum delivery time.