EFFECTIVE ALGORITHMS FOR MULTICAST VIDEO TRANSPORT TO MEET VARIOUS QOS REQUIREMENTS

In this paper, we propose flow aggregation algorithms for multicast vi deo transport. Because of heterogeneities of network/client environmen ts and users' preference on the perceived Video quality, various QoS r equirements must be simultaneously guaranteed even for the single vide o source in the multicast connection. It is easy but ineffective to pr ovide many video streams according to each user's request. Our flow ag gregation algorithm arranges similar QoS requirements of clients into a single QoS requirement, by which the required number of video stream s that the video server prepares can be decreased. Then the total amou nt of the required bandwidth can be reduced by sharing the same video stream among a number of clients. Our flow aggregation algorithm has t wo variants, which are suitable to sender-initiated and receiver-initi ated multicast connections, respectively. Proposed algorithms are eval uated and compared through simulation. Then we show that the server-in itiated flow aggregation (an ideal case in our approach) is most effec tive, but the receiver-initiated flow aggregation can also offer a rea sonably effective mechanism.