Hybrid Multicast Scheme for Many-to-Many Videoconferencing

Native multicast is not ubiquitous available now, providing efficient way for unicast end-hosts to access multicast session is important for many-to-many videoconferencing. Reflector-based hybrid multicast scheme is not scalable for bottleneck of its capacity and deployment expenses. We proposed one peer-based hybrid multicast scheme for scalable many-to-many videoconferencing. The multicast-capable end-hosts are designed as peers to forward packets from multicast group to unicast clients or in the reverse direction. Peer clustering is adopted for unicast users to locate nearby peers easily. Furthermore we seek to minimize the total delay cost of local area end-hosts via bit rate adjustment method with a linear programming model. Simulation and application case show the peer-based hybrid multicasting is more scalable and more efficient than reflector-based scheme.