Abstract

The recent advent of the Internet Multicast service has enabled a number of successful real-time multimedia applications, yet the scalability of these applications remains challenged by the inherent heterogeneity of the underlying Internet. One promising approach for taming this heterogeneity is to encode each media flow as a layered signal that is striped across multiple multicast groups, thereby allowing a receiver to tune its individual reception rate by modulating its subscription to multicast groups. Though significant progress had been made on media transport protocols and congestion control strategies for adjusting multicast groups in this fashion, comparatively little work has been devoted to extending the session directory service and address allocation architecture to meet the needs and requirements of layered media. Moreover, the large-scale deployment of layered media formats is hindered by the lack of support for layered formats in existing session directory tools. To over...

Citations