MQ: An Integrated Mechanism for Multimedia Multicasting

This paper studies the integration of multimedia
multicasting, with the consideration of multicast with end-to-end
QoS guarantees by resource reservation, dynamic join and departure
of participants, user heterogeneity, scalability, robustness,
and loop-free control. A protocol called MQ, Multicast with QoS,
is proposed to support 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. It also accommodates
heterogeneous users with varied QoS, dynamically adjusts QoS
trees to improve resource utilization, and guarantees end-to-end
QoS requirements.We have conducted simulations to evaluate the
performance of the proposed mechanism. MQ demonstrates its
advantages over the 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
guarantees, and more efficient resource utilization to enhance
system performance.