A Lightweight SCTP for Partially Reliable Overlay Video Multicast Service for Mobile Terminals

In this article, a video multicast protocol for multi-homed mobile terminals is proposed as an alternative stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) for partially reliable multicast services. It works with overlay peer-to-peer video multicast facility in the application layer. For a multi-homed mobile terminal, an error burst may occur when a handover is in process in the primary path switching procedure. The key issue concerned in this protocol is the ability to predict packet loss and to retransmit the lost packets as soon as a mobile terminal completes its primary path switching procedure. This property controls the delay sensitivity of transmissions. Conversely, the protocol can tolerate partial loss in video transmission as long as the loss is limited to a relatively short error burst. In addition, it reduces the message overhead significantly and provides a scalable communication mechanism for multicast applications. The performance improvement of the proposed protocol comes from 1) the estimation of temporal velocity of mobile terminals with lost packet prediction in a long error burst, and 2) the requirement for each mobile terminal to indicate which packets can be safely discarded from its agent.