SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MULTICAST STREAM FAILOVER

摘要

A system and method for avoiding a single point of failure in the broadcast of streaming data. The system uses multiple redundant servers (10, 12) streamin g the exactly same data to a failover device (16). The failover device buffers (20P, 20S) the streams 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 streams are identical and are synchronized, there is not outage for multicast receivers when the primary data source fails since ther e is a switch to exactly the same data in the next packet of the secondary dat a stream.