The Join/Leave Policy for Video Multicast Group Members

There has been a surge of interest in the delivery of real-time applications to heterogeneous receivers over the Army network in the recent years. The real-time applications such as imagery and video when transmitted in a multicast environment are still challenging. The challenges are mainly due to the potential for a large number of receivers with different heterogeneous capabilities such as reception rate, client´s buffers, processing speed rate, etc and the sensitivity of the real-time media, in terms of average packet delay, packet loss, etc. In an attempt to improve the real-time media at the receivers´ side, we propose a mechanism that gives the receiver dynamic ability to move from one multicast group to another based on the receiver capabilities and the network conditions. We demonstrate through simulation that the proposed mechanism enforces fairness between the receivers and that the video quality adaptation is smooth so that the impact on the perceptual quality at the client is minimal.