A Mechanism for Multicast Multimedia Data With Adaptive QoS Characteristics

In this paper, we describe a mechanism for adaptive transmission of
multimedia data, which is based on real time protocols. The proposed
mechanism can be used for multicast multimedia data over heterogeneous
networks, like the Internet, and has the capability to adapt the transmission of
the multimedia data to network changes. In addition, the adaptive multicast
transmission mechanism uses an inter-receiver fairness function in order to treat
the group of receivers with fairness in a heterogeneous environment. The
proposed mechanism uses a “friendly” to the network users congestion control
policy to control the transmission of the data. We evaluate the adaptive
multicast transmission mechanism through a number of simulations in order to
examine its fairness to the group of receivers and its behavior against TCP and
UDP data streams.