Trade-off between fairness and stability in layered video multicast

Layered multicast is a promising technique for distributing video to a set of heterogeneous receivers. While several layered multicast approaches have been proposed, prior work usually perform adaptation on the receiver's side and use static rate allocation techniques at the sender's side. In this paper, we show an adaptation framework that improves stability and fairness of receivers by employing dynamic layer rate allocation on the sender's side. We first propose a novel metric, called Stability-aware Fairness Index (SFI), which can represent the system stability as well as fairness. We then formulate the optimal layer rate allocation problem with the objective of minimizing the expected SFI for all the receivers in a multicast session, and derive an efficient algorithm to solve the problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can significant improve the degree of stability and fairness compared to static allocation based schemes.