A scheduling engine to allocate resources for multicast transmissions over a satellite link

IP multicast over satellite provides the broadcasting capability for mass content delivery. In this contribution, a scheduling engine is proposed to allocate the main resources, including the bandwidth, for store and forward multicast transmissions on a satellite link. The paper starts with an elaboration on two issues that have an important impact on the overall problem: the reliability scheme for multicast transmissions, and the implementation of resource reservation and allocation. Within this context, the actual algorithm or engine for bandwidth allocation is presented. The entire scheduling algorithm is extended in order to be able to accommodate multiple or hybrid delivery mechanisms. The implementation and results of this framework for resource allocation are discussed.