Prioritized Flow Optimization with Generalized Routing for Scalable Multirate Multicasting

This paper addresses the performance optimization for scalable video coding and multicast over networks. Multi-path video streaming, network coding based routing, and network flow control are jointly optimized to maximize a network utility function defined over heterogeneous receivers. Importantly, contextual priors of scalable video layers are imposed on the flow routing optimization problem, seeking to guarantee the transmission cost for each layer in an incremental order and find jointly optimal multicast paths and associated rates. Through a primal decomposition and the primal-dual approach, a decentralized algorithm with two-level optimization update is developed to solve the target convex optimization problem. Numerical and simulation results validate the convergence and network performance of the proposed algorithm.