A rate adaptation scheme for layered multicast using MSS in mobile networks

Layered multicast was introduced to address the heterogeneity problem of network and receivers in multimedia multicast. With the highly increasing interest in mobile communication, the need for extending layered multicast to mobile communications has increased. However, the conventional layered multicast approaches have not considered host mobility and a handoff can cause stability and fairness problems in wireless networks. We propose a new rate adaptation scheme using a mobile support station (MSS) to provide quick resolution of an unstable state of a network and fair bandwidth allocation at handoff by priority dropping of the less important layers in the outgoing queue and MSS-controlled rate adaptation. The proposed scheme is evaluated using network simulator ns-2 and its result shows that the proposed one outperforms RLM (receiver-driven layered multicast) (see McCanne, S. et al., ACM SIGCOMM, 1996) by about 80% in terms of stability and fairness at handoff.