This may be slightly out of this forums helps but i’ll ask anyway
We have 4 Mikrotik Routers in a chain, Tower0 – Tower1 – Tower 2 – Tower 3
Tower1-3 have 10 Clients attached at each point, lets assume that each tower link is its own /30 ip and the clients are on a /26 each,
each client is directly connected without any PPP. We offer a live video stream on our network that comes in at Tower0, this stream is 2mbit.
What we see right now is that when all clients (30) view the stream we see the following useage on the links
Tower 0 – Tower 1 = 60mbit
Tower 1 – Tower 2 = 40mbit
Tower 2 – Tower 3 = 20mbit
As you can see it max’s out our links, is there anyway to for us to lessen the load on the links since the stream is the same data x 30. I’m not sure if this is something that routeros can do but if it can i cant see it.
Is there anyway to stream data in this way via routeros or via some other software?
If i’m reading this correctly i would need to place a full server at each towers location?
No, you should send the data to multiple destination addresses, this method is “multicast”.
Don’t know what the BBC FAQ means by Multicast though…
that is one way of doing it.
Mikrotik, currently, does not seem to support IGMP, which is required for Multicast packets to travel across a routed network.
If your entire network is bridged from your clients all the way to your POP (this is not recommended, but some ISPs work this way), then you simply put a Multicast server such as a Windows 2003 Enterprise box with the free Windows Media Encoder to send out a multicast stream. Your clients then just have to ‘attach to’ this multicast stream. You will only have 1 copy of the stream being sent out to your network, no matter how many are watching it.
If your network is fully routed (the way an ISP network should be), then it gets a bit more fun, since Mikrotik does not support multicasting across routed networks.
You could get around it with some clever use of EoIP or IPIP and maybe some routing tricks, but I wouldn’t know the details.