## 6 Discussion  
Our decentralized chain-topology system proves effective across three demanding real-world settings: multi-campus academic conferences, province-wide smart-classroom teaching, and cost-sensitive commercial live events. In all cases, direct IPv6 interconnection eliminates central servers, private lines, and NAT-traversal gateways, driving capital and operating expenditures sharply downward. Equally important, millisecond-level Web-Socket heartbeats coupled with SRT's rapid listener-caller re-handshake enable automatic hop repair in \(\leq\)2 s; attendees perceive neither black frames nor audio dropouts when a venue or WAN link fails, a capability repeatedly confirmed during eight-venue field trials. The significant performance gains in our system, particularly in VMAF scores and frame delivery, stem from fundamental architectural and protocol-level advantages over traditional RTMP. At its core, SRT's use of UDP offers a crucial departure from RTMP's reliance on TCP. While TCP provides reliable delivery essential for general data, its inherent congestion control mechanisms, such as additive increase/multiplicative decrease (AIMD) and slow start, can introduce significant latency and inefficiencies in real-time video streaming, especially under fluctuating network conditions. SRT, by contrast, layers sophisticated reliability features, including Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC), on top of UDP. This allows for more granular control over retransmissions and less head-of-line blocking, enabling efficient recovery of lost packets without the cumulative delays characteristic of TCP. Furthermore, SRT's intelligent congestion control algorithms, such as its Live mode, are specifically optimized for low-latency, high-throughput streaming, intelligently adapting to network dynamics to maintain consistent quality. Figure 8: Latency in different chain lengths. Beyond protocol design, the decentralized chain topology inherently removes the single point of failure (SPOF) present in centralized RTMP server architectures. This distributed design not only enhances fault tolerance but also distributes the processing and bandwidth load across multiple nodes, preventing bottlenecks that plague centralized systems. Each segment of our chain contributes to a more predictable and manageable latency profile, avoiding the compounded processing overhead and queuing delays that occur when all traffic converges at a single RTMP server. This distributed processing contributes directly to the well-preserved visual fidelity, as evidenced by the minimal 2.1 dB PSNR drop across eight hops. Moreover, the system's adaptive buffering and selective retransmission strategies further enhance resilience to network volatility. By dynamically adjusting buffer sizes based on real-time network conditions and selectively retransmitting only lost packets, the system minimizes unnecessary data transmission while ensuring that critical frames are delivered promptly. This approach contrasts sharply with traditional RTMP systems, which often rely on larger buffers and indiscriminate retransmissions, leading to increased latency and potential playback disruptions. Extensive quantitative tests reinforce these architectural gains. Relative to traditional centralized RTMP baselines [62], our system lifts mean Video Multi-Resolution Fidelity (VMAF) by 27% and cuts frame-drop rate by 30% along eight-hop, 200 ms RTT international chains. As shown in Figure 9, bitrate sweeps reveal a clear quality-bitrate knee: raising the send rate from 2 Mbps to 10 Mbps raises VMAF from 62 to 85, after which gains plateau. Accordingly, we recommend 10 Mbps as the default operating point for 1080p classrooms and live events that must respect edge-link ceilings. Component ablation further highlights resilience factors: disabling the fallback path enlarges recovery time from 1.3 s to 3.7 s and raises packet-loss spikes to 1.9%; removing local buffering lowers VMAF by more than ten points under 1% burst-loss, producing visible stutter.