Traffic control mechanism to support video multicast over IP networks

A major impediment to the development of networked video applications is the lack of adequate support for video multicast within the Internet Protocol (IP). This paper presents an approach for extending the capability of IP to support multicast of video streams in a heterogeneous networking environment where there are static variations in the capacities of the links and the video quality needs of the receivers as well as dynamic variations in the available bandwidth of the network links. The approach, called IP extensions for video multicast (IPEVM), uses an innovative traffic control mechanism within the network routers that dynamically adapts the quality of the video to changes in the available network bandwidth while ensuring fair treatment of all traffic contending for the network´s best effort service. It also permits an application-selectable mix of resource reservation and adaptive bandwidth management to be used in building networked video applications.