System and method for multicast stream failover
AssigneesRoad Runner Co., Ltd., ServiceCo, LLC
InventorsKenneth Gould, Joo C. Chung, Michael Sun, Frank Huang
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A system and method for avoiding a single point of failure in the broadcast of streaming data. The system uses multiple redundant servers steaming the exactly same data to a failover device. The failover device buffers the steams into a primary and secondary data stream and automatically switches from the primary to the secondary data stream if it detects a corruption in the primary data stream. Since the buffered data packets of the two steams are identical and are synchronized, there is not outage for multicast receivers when the primary data source fails since there is a switch to exactly the same data in the next packet of the secondary data stream.
Claims24
A multicast failover device comprising:
- a processor;
- at least one primary receiver for receiving packets from at least one primary multicast stream source;
- at least one secondary receiver for receiving packets from at least one secondary multicast stream source;
- logic for multicasting packets received by the primary multicast stream source over an external network;
- logic for detecting an adverse change in a packet from the primary multicast stream;
- and
- logic for multicasting a packet from the secondary multicast stream in lieu of multicasting the packet from the primary multicast stream when the adverse change in the packet of the primary multicast stream is detected.
A system for reliable multicasting of streaming data comprising:
- primary stream packets having a first multicast IP address and port number;
- secondary stream packets having a second multicast IP address and port number;
- an enterprise network on which the sources for primary stream packets and secondary stream packets are connected;
- a multicast failover device connected to the enterprise network comprises:
- a receiver for receiving the primary multicast stream packets;
- a receiver for receiving a secondary multicast stream of packets;
- an external network for transmitting multicast stream packets to at least one user;
- logic for multicasting the primary multicast stream packets over the external network;
- logic for detecting an adverse change in a packet from the primary multicast stream;
- logic for multicasting a secondary multicast stream packet over the external network in lieu of multicasting the primary multicast stream packet when the adverse change in the primary multicast stream packet is detected.
A method for reliably multicasting data comprising;
- receiving over an enterprise network primary multicast stream packets from a primary multicast stream server, said packets having a first multicast IP address and port number;
- receiving over an enterprise network secondary multicast stream packets from a secondary multicast stream server, said packets having a second multicast IP address and port number;
- multicasting the primary multicast stream packets over an external network;
- detecting an adverse change in a packet from the primary multicast stream;
- multicasting a secondary multicast stream packet over the external network in lieu of multicasting the primary multicast stream when the adverse change in the packet of the primary multicast stream is detected.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.