The active traffic control mechanism for layered multimedia multicast in active network

In multicasting multimedia data, effectively adapting to heterogeneous receivers is very difficult. In this paper, we propose a new scheme called the “active traffic control mechanism for layered multimedia multicasting” (ATLM) in an active network environment. The proposed scheme controls traffic at each router using the traffic condition of immediate children nodes. Also, the traffic adjustment is much finer than existing multicast protocols of single-layer granularity. Computer simulation reveals that the proposed scheme significantly improves the amount of delivered traffic and the end-to-end delay by as much as 10%, as compared to layer-wise adjustment. Moreover, it does not require one to maintain multiple sessions for transferring multi-layer data but only one session, and thus reduces the overheads on session management and network bandwidth