Supporting transcoding-based multicast groups

Leveraging the ubiquity of mobile devices, innovative social and cognitive applications are emerging. However, the gap between these social community services/applications and multicast transmission hinders their wide spread deployment and affect commercial viability. This leads us to rethink the existing broadcast/multicast transmission paradigm, especially group management features in mobile networks. We propose a hierarchal group management framework and shows how transcoding based groups can be managed. We discusses the network architecture and signaling interactions. Results are presented to highlight the resource usage for groups based in multiple codecs in an MBMS environment. This work is carried out as part of EU-IST project C-MOBILE (IST-2005-27423).