Multisource Receiver-driven Layered Multicast

Receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM) is an efficient solution for streaming multimedia content over the IP network. In RLM, a content is encoded into a number of layers which are sent to distinct multicast groups. On the other hand, a receiver subscribes to a subset of groups (i.e., layers) according to some criterion (e.g., network congestion) with no direct interactivity with the sender. This paper considers multisource RLM (MRLM) in which multiple content sources are available, thus the receiver has an additional criterion - content priorities. This problem has applications in remote monitoring and other fields. A reception control method called PAC (priority-based autonomous control) is proposed. The main idea of PAC is to allocate active time for each receiver process according to the given priorities, while leaving them run autonomously. A preliminary experimental study is shown to demonstrate algorithm PAC.