Network Cooperative MultiRate Control Method in IP multicasting

Layered multicasting based on the layer-coded content has been proposed to deliver video content at multiple rates to receivers with various access bandwidths. In this paper, we propose a new stream rate control method in layered multicasting, the network cooperative multirate control method, which can prevent the packet losses and keep the video quality higher than that of conventional methods which are loss-based receiver driven schemes. The proposed method can achieve loss less rate control by using ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) to notify receivers the network congestion status before packet losses occur. We evaluated our proposal method with experimental network system and verified the following effects. Our proposal method can control the video streaming rate according to the receiver’s access bandwidth without packet losses when a receiver receives a video content, and it can control the video streaming rate without packet losses and improve the throughput of other service when a receiver receives a video and other service simultaneously compared to the conventional method.