Hypermesh speeds streaming media

  If you think you've been enjoying streaming media from YouTube and other video-oriented Web sites, Scott Ryan has a real treat for you-the hypermesh. Ryan is the CEO of an Atlanta-based startup Asankya Inc., which will be rolling out its "packet-level multipathing" (PLMP) technology in 10 U.S. urban areas later in Q2. He contends that "progressive download" sites like YouTube do not have the capability of handling live media events or high-definition (HD)-quality streams because the content flows from one site through a single path via a local caching server to your PC. However, Ryan claims, PLMP can send the same data stream over multiple paths to assure maximum performance of the content delivery rate.

PLMP depends on Asankya's giganode caching devices that reside inside ISP data centers as well as the company's softnode plug-in that you install on your Windows XP systems. (Vista support arrives later this year, but the OS X softnode won't ship until 2009.) Ryan likens the softnode to a Flash plug-in and hopes someday to have it standard in PC operating systems. The softnode augments the giganode in the cloud and acts like a peer-to-peer agent using your machine (or your neighbor's) to pass along a data stream to the next closest content requester.

Ryan says all the nodes for a given streaming session are tracked in a central pathing table, which is updated in real time so service rates achieve the highest throughput. He says the pathing table holds no file-level information about a PC running the softnode, only its location on the content path, thus, he says, the system is secure. Ryan argues the PLMP hypermesh is ideal for media sites that seek to offer IP-based content live with HDquality. The technology stems from research out of the Georgia Institute of Technology and will be worth a serious look when it arrives.