Bandwidth Management for Mixed Unicast and Multicast Multimedia Flows with Perception Based QoS Differentiation

Efficient bandwidth allocation is among the most important open issues in network traffic control aiming to offer a QoS assurance, especially when unicast and multicast multimedia flows coexist. With new QoS concepts: user/flow satisfaction, this paper presents a user perception oriented QoS model, and a generalized bandwidth allocation method which can actively adapt to the dynamics of the network and has global convergence capability for an optimal solution of bandwidth allocation. Our method effectively exploits all available bandwidth resources, and can provide effective QoS differentiated services when different types of unicast and multicast multimedia streams coexist. The proposed method has great flexibility that QoS differentiation can be guaranteed in both heavy and light load conditions. For heavy load cases, the allocation results will satisfy all users as much as possible. And for light load cases, all redundant bandwidth will be fully exploited while distinct QoS differentiation is kept. Based on our approach, a soft system capacity similar to the one in CDMA networks will be provided.