SDRAM: a SD channel-based multicast scheme on ATM networks for multimedia transmissions

Multicast delivery has become more and more important in modern multimedia applications. VoD and videoconferences are two examples. Multimedia integrates texts, audios, videos and still images in a variety of applications. The data in this media can be time critical in terms of maximum delay and delay jitter. In order to satisfy all these applications, the network needs to have an efficient multicasting mechanism using the true capability of ATM networks. In the native solution, a separate connection can be set up from the source to each group node, also called full connectivity. The full connectivity needs O(N²) connections, where N is the number of nodes in a group. Instead, we can have one tree spanning all the participants. Multicast using a single shared tree has become the trend. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional multipoint-to-multipoint multicast scheme, a SD channel-based Multicast with Round-robin Access (SDRAM), for ATM networks, which uses a single tree for a multicast group consisting of multiple participants that are either senders, receivers, or a mix of both. We first discuss why the resequencer model will not be suitable for multimedia traffic, then propose the SDRAM scheme to solve the problems, and finally compare our scheme with the resequencer model through simulation. Results show the mean queuing delays and mean inter-PDU delays of our scheme are not sensitive to mean PDU size while the mean queuing delays and mean inter-PDU delays of the resequencer scheme are very sensitive to mean PDU size.