Receiver-Cooperative Bandwidth Management for Layered Multicast

In this paper, we propose a receiver-cooperative bandwidth management method for layered multicast streams, considering not only bandwidth requirements but also receivers’ preference. In our method, we assume that each receiver has a preference value for each layer of streams. When a receiver requests an additional layer and required bandwidth is not available on links, it can let other receivers release a part of the layers of streams which they receive if, it increases the sum of the satisfied preference values of all receivers as a total. We give an algorithm to calculate an optimal way of releasing layers in a polynomial time under some assumption. We had an experiment to transmit JPEG video over a private IP network and confirmed that our method could control bandwidth among the video streams within a second.