Summary: Multi­Session Rate Control for Layered Video Multicast
Xue Li a and Sanjoy Paul b and Mostafa H. Ammar c
a Bell Labs Research, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
b Bell Labs Research, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ, USA
c College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
ABSTRACT
In a video multicast session, the receivers may possess different capabilities or be connected to the network through a
variety of different access speeds. Multicasting video traffic at any one rate to all of the receivers can be unfair as some
receivers may experience high losses while others find that their full reception capacity is not fully utilized. Layered
video multicast protocols have been developed to address this intra­session fairness problem. In such protocols (e.g.,
RLM and LVMR), video is multicast in multiple layers over separate multicast groups. Receivers join as many
layers as they can handle. While protocols such as RLM and LVMR have been shown to successfully address the
intra­session fairness issue in video multicast, they do not address the issue of inter­session fairness, i.e., fair sharing
between multiple video sessions and TCP sessions. In this paper, we demonstrate and develop insight into the
inter­session fairness problem through a set of simulation experiments. We then propose a novel idea to improve
inter­session fairness for layered video multicast protocol: layer­based congestion sensitivity mechanism, and finally
evaluate it with some other end­to­end schemes designed to promote inter­session fairness when used to augment
layered video multicast protocols.
Keywords: multicast, rate control, inter­session fairness, layered video, congestion control, TCP­friendliness
1. INTRODUCTION

Source: Ammar, Mostafa - College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences