Receiver-cooperative bandwidth management for layered multicast

In this paper, we propose a receiver-cooperative bandwidth management method for layered multicast streams, considering not only bandwidth requirements but also receivers´ preference. In the method, we assume that each receiver has a preference value for each layer of streams. When a receiver requests an additional layer and required bandwidth is not available on links, it can let other receivers release a part of the layers of streams which they receive if it increases the sum of the satisfied preference values of all receivers as a total. We give an algorithm to calculate an optimal way of releasing layers in a polynomial time under some assumption. We did an experiment to transmit JPEG video over a private IP network and confirmed that the method could control bandwidth among the video streams within a second.