On multicast transfer of hierarchically coded video with QoS guarantees

We propose a control method for high quality and highly effective video multicasting to satisfy various QoS requirements of clients. Our method employs an MPEG-2 hierarchical coding technique for that purpose. Further, flow aggregation is introduced to achieve application level QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees. Our method can guarantee the network level QoS only if underlying networks provide some guaranteed services as in ATM, Intserv and Diffserv. We investigate the effectiveness and applicability of our method on networks with various QoS guarantees.