Behaviour investigation using simulation for redundant multicast transmission supporting adaptive QoS

In this paper we describe a mechanism for redundant multicast transmission of multimedia data supporting adaptive QoS over the Internet and we investigate its behaviour using simulation. There are two major issues that have to be considered when designing and implementing such a mechanism, the fairness, which is the ability to cope with receiver heterogeneity, and the adaptation schemes. The proposed mechanism uses a friendly to the network users congestion control policy to control the transmission of the data. We evaluate the adaptive multicast transmission mechanism through a number of simulations in order to examine its behaviour to a heterogeneous group of receivers and its behaviour against TCP and UDP data streams. The main conclusion of the simulation was that the proposed mechanism has friendly behaviour against the dominant traffic types of today´s Internet and treats a heterogeneous group of receivers with fairness.