Abstract-This paper presents our work on developing an architecture for multicasting real-time MPEG4 over IP networks that provide service differentiation. In particular, this work is targeted at assured forwarding (AF) style services. This work is an attempt to find a simple solution to the problem of multicast congestion control of real-time traffic by exploiting the service differentiation capabilities of AF networks. Our architecture assumes loss differentiation in the network and assumes the network's ability to provide explicit congestion notification messages to the sender. We do not consider policing/shaping at the edge routers. Rather, we consider a more general case where packet marking and flow control are provided at the senders. For this network model, we built an end-to-end architecture and developed a rate-adaptation algorithm that can operate in both unicast and multicast applications with a minor modification. The simulation results show how the rate-adaptation algorithm accommodates different receivers with different networking capabilities and provides receivers with different levels of quality by taking advantage of the queue management capabilities of the AF service. We test how the architecture scales to a large number of receivers, how multiple multicast sessions interact, and how it interacts with TCP.Index Terms-Assured forwarding, differentiated services (diffserv), MPEG, multicast, multimedia, real-time, RED, video.
I. BACKGROUNDA LARGE number of group communication applications has emerged recently on the Internet. These applications have been the driving force behind the efforts of research and development of the IP Multicast technology. IP Multicast enables multipoint communications over IP networks while preserving bandwidth in a manner that can be extremely significant in cases of large groups. However, deployment of IP multicast services over the Internet has not been as rapid as needed. One of the main factors that contribute to this slow deployment is the lack of a multicast congestion control scheme that can be as robust as its unicast counterparts (e.g., TCP congestion control for reliable unicast).The major challenges in the area of multicast congestion control are as follows.1) The heterogeneity of receivers' networking capabilities as well as the heterogeneity of their QoS-requirements. 2) Maintaining the scalability of the multicast congestion control technique is a difficult task as the number of receivers is unknown to the sender and may grow significantly. From the literature, multicast congestion control techniques can be classified into two categories: the sender-based (single-rate) techniques and the receiver-based (multirate, layered) techniques. All the examples presented here of both categories are pure end-to-end.
A. Receiver-Based TechniquesReceiver-based techniques are based on the ability to generate the source data in a layered format and sending the layers as different multicast groups. Each layer contains a subset of the information being sent. Receivers d...