Achieving Fairness and Scalability in Multicast Video Distribution
using Receiver-Only Rate Control
In this paper, we present a fair and scalable multicast
video distribution technique
that does not use feedback information from receivers.
The importance of such an approach is highlighted by
the rapid growth of the MBone and the Internet.
Our scheme works by encoding video hierarchically and transmitting
the hierarchical substreams using different multicast groups.
The sender periodically transmits state information about
the available video streams.
Receivers use the state information to determine and receive independently
a subset of streams whose total data rate matches
their capacities.
We have implemented a prototype of the video distribution scheme
using IP-multicast.
Experimental results show that our receiver-only rate control technique
can achieve a very high degree of fairness among a set of heterogeneous
receivers if the sender offers video with a sufficiently wide spectrum of
qualities and data rates.
PS COPY
(1.4MB)