An Adaptive Multicast Tree with QoS Support for Heterogeneous Recipients

This paper proposes a new protocol called MQ, Multicast with QoS, which supports multimedia group communications with QoS guarantees for heterogeneous recipients. With MQ, while resource reservation is de-coupled from QoS multicast routing, they are integrated in a way to avoid the problem of “sender-oriented” path determination, a problem that occurs when RSVP is used in conjunction with QoS routing for heterogeneous reservations. Being a truly receiver-oriented and integrated scheme for multimedia multicasting, MQ supports such integration in a robust, scalable and loop-free way, accommodates heterogeneous users with varied QoS, dynamically adjusts QoS trees to improve resource utilization, and benefits from being an integrated mechanism to ensure end-to-end QoS services. We have also conducted simulations to evaluate the performance of MQ. MQ demonstrates its advantages to conventional loosely coupled integration of IP multicasting, resource reservation and QoS routing, in terms of better accommodation of heterogeneous users, higher scalability, lower blocking probability for users to join groups with service guarantee, and more efficient resource utilization to enhance system performance.