MQ: an integrated mechanism for multimedia multicasting

This paper studies the integration of multimedia multicasting, with the consideration of multicast with end-to-end QoS guarantees by resource reservation, dynamic join and departure of participants, user heterogeneity, scalability, robustness, and loop-free control. A protocol called MQ, Multicast with QoS, is proposed to support multimedia group communications with QoS guarantees for heterogeneous recipients. With MQ, while resource reservation is de-coupled from QoS multicast routing, they are integrated in a way to avoid the problem of “sender-oriented” path determination, a problem that occurs when RSVP is used in conjunction with QoS routing for heterogeneous reservations. Being a truly receiver-oriented and integrated scheme for multimedia multicasting, MQ supports such integration in a robust, scalable and loop-free way. It also accommodates heterogeneous users with varied QoS, dynamically adjusts QoS trees to improve resource utilization, and guarantees end-to-end QoS requirements. We have conducted simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism. MQ demonstrates its advantages over the conventional loosely coupled integration of TP multicasting, resource reservation and QoS routing, in terms of better accommodation of heterogeneous users, higher scalability, lower blocking probability for users to join groups with service guarantees, and more efficient resource utilization to enhance system performance