A Hybrid Coarse/Fine Layered Multicast Scheme Based on Hierarchical Bandwidth Inference Congestion Control

Traditional approaches to receiver-driven layered multicast apply coarse-grain layered congestion control, which enables each receiver to adjust its receiving rate to match the available bandwidth. However, this restricts the scalability of fine-grain scalable video coding. In this paper, we present an approach that facilitates bandwidth inference congestion control in a hybrid coarse/fine layered multicast scheme for multimedia delivery. One-way delay trend detection has proven effective in explicitly or implicitly estimating end-to-end available bandwidth. Using a hierarchical layered probing scheme and a delay trend detection method, we have developed a congestion control protocol for fine-grain layered multicast. Combining this protocol with scalable video coding, we present a framework that achieves efficient scalable video streaming over heterogeneous networks. The performance of our hybrid coarse/fine layered multicast scheme is evaluated by network simulations and the video coding efficiency.