Credit - Based Flow Control with Explicit Rate Feedback for Adaptive Video

In an era of proliferating multimedia applications, support for video transmission is rapidly becoming a basic requirement of network architectures. Furthermore, since most video applications (e.g., teleconferencing, television broadcast, video surveillance, interactive video games) are inherently multicast in nature, network architectures that can e ciently transport high quality, multicast video are essential. The main problem complicatingmulticast video transport is variation in network bandwidth constraints. An attractive solution to this problem is to use an adaptive, multi-layered video encoding mechanism. In this paper, we consider a credit-based mechanism for the support of video multicast that relies on explicit rate congestion feedback from multicast destinations as well as hop-by-hop ow control. The responsiveness, bandwidth utilization, video quality and fairness of the mechanism are evaluated through simulations. Results suggest that the proposed mechanism is capable of providing a high quality video service in the presence of varying bandwidth constraints.