LM-MCM: A New Layered Multicast Transmission Protocol for Live Streaming

A major challenge in the Internet is to deliver live video content with a good quality to large number of heterogeneous receivers. Layered multicast is a promising solution to accomplish this task efficiently. However, schemes using it suffer from slow convergence time, lack of inter-session fairness and TCP-friendliness, and considerable losses induced by slow response; and failed join-experiments. This paper proposes a new layered multicast with multilevel congestion marking (LM-MCM). A fundamental contribution of this scheme is introducing a multilevel congestion marking strategy (MCM) which enables a router to mark the congestion-flag field of each arriving LM-MCM packet according to the average queue size. Furthermore, based on the average congestion-flag, each receiver can improve/reduce the quality of service it receives to respond to the network congestion. We evaluated LM-MCM in a number of scenarios on NS2 simulator. The results show LM-MCM converges quickly to the optimal layer of subscription, induces less loss to track the available bandwidth, and has inter-session fairness and TCP-friendliness