Multimedia Streaming

Multimedia Streaming

The pure throughput of TCP payload of Ronja is 9.487 Mbits. According to Wikipedia, the maximum data rate of DVD video is 9.8Mbps MPEG-2 and the typical rate is between 3 and 10Mbps. That means that most DVD movies are directly streamable through Ronja in realtime.

Internet radio stations often broadcast in 128kbps MP3 or 80kbps Ogg Vorbis. One Ronja link can then carry 74 MP3 or 118 Ogg Vorbis radio stations of this quality in parallel.

Important advantage of Ronja link for multimedia streaming is it's low latency. The latency is dictated only by the propagation time of the optical signal through atmosphere, which is essentially the speed of light. The latency doesn't change with time or with load, because Ronja is full duplex and doesn't perform any retransmits. Therefore a packet cannot be delayed by Ronja. This ensures optimum conditions to multimedia streaming, which is generally sensitive to latency changes.

Simplified unidirectional Ronja

Ronja can operate in unidirectional mode. This allows significant cost savings. One end needs to have just Twister2 and the transmitter, the other Twister and a receiver. This saves both electronics and mechanics and the resulting device is half the size of full Ronja. Software configuration for this scenario is not difficult - the transmitter of the multimedia stream needs to be configured to use UDP or RTP and network broadcast address.