Scalable traffic control scheme for interactive multimedia sessions

Abstract

IP multicast is very useful mechanism to deliver data to a large number of receivers such as interactive multimedia sessions. It can not accommodate the heterogeneity of the receivers including network heterogeneity. We propose a multicast traffic controller(s) in a router to solve such situation. A traffic controller has a filter to moderate the output data rate to a link. It makes use of Time-to-Live (TTL) threshold to specify the minimum requirement of a packet, Multimedia data are encoded into multiple layers; basic layer and enhanced layers. By associating TTLs of data layers and the threshold of the filter. we can moderate the traffic by dropping the data of less significant layer. The threshold is dynamically modified according to the local network traffic and link traffic. Our scheme also helps a network and a link(s) avoid from congestion and accommodate other types of traffic at the same time.