Achieving inter-session fairness for layered video multicast

The Internet is increasingly used to deliver multimedia services. Since there are heterogeneous receivers and changing network conditions, it has been proposed to use adaptive rate control techniques such as layered video multicast to adjust the video traffic according to the available Internet resources. A problem of layered video multicast is that it is unable to provide fair bandwidth sharing between competing video sessions. We propose two schemes, layered video multicast with congestion sensitivity and adaptive join-timer (LVMCA) and layered video multicast with priority dropping (LVMPD), to achieve inter-session fairness for layered video multicast. Receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM), layer-based congestion sensitivity, LVMCA, and LVMPD are simulated and compared. Results show both proposed schemes, especially LVMPD, are fairer and have shorter convergence time than the other two schemes.