On receiver-driven congestion control for multicast streaming delivery

In streaming services nowadays, distortion of received data is mainly caused by congestion in traversing routers within the best-effort Internet. Thus, mechanisms to control the rate of transmitted data are crucial to improve user´s perception and acceptance of these evolving services. Layered multicast is considered as a promising technique to easily adapt to locally available bandwidth by striping a stream into different layers of information, which in combination result in the highest quality of reception under the currently available network resources. For that, each layer is transmitted within a separate multicast group, and receivers join or leave layers appropriately for bandwidth adaptation, i.e., implementing the adaptation decision in each receiver. Several approaches have been proposed to realize this adaptation decision. This paper presents an overview of these proposals and also briefly outlines an approach to improve the response time of the adaptation process by extending the Internet Group Management Protocol appropriately. This extension promises an improved congestion control response time and a simplification of the receiver-driven adaptation decisions