Network-Supported Layered Multicast Transport Control for Streaming Media

Multicast is very efficient in distributing a large volume of data to multiple receivers over the Internet. Layered multicast helps solve the heterogeneity problem in multicast delivery. Extensive work has been done in the area of layered multicast, for both congestion control and error control. In this paper, we focus on network-supported protocols for streaming media. Most of the existing work solves the congestion control and error control problems separately and does not give an integrated efficient solution. In this paper, after reviewing related work, we introduce our proposed protocols, namely, router-assisted layered multicast (RALM) and router-assisted layered FEC (RALF). The former is a congestion control protocol, whereas the latter is an error control protocol. They work under the same framework and provide an integrated solution. We also extend RALM to RALM-II, which is compatible with transmission control protocol (TCP) traffic. We analyze the complexity of the proposed protocols in the network and investigate their performance through simulations. We show that our solution achieves significant performance gains with reasonable additional complexity.