Dynamic Distributed Collaborative Merging Policy to Optimize the Multicasting Delivery Scheme

Abstract

The advance of Internet 2 and the proliferation of switches and routers with level three functionalities made the multicast one of the most feasible video streaming delivering techniques for the near future. Assuming this to be true, this study addressed the over-load situation that a streaming server could suffer due to client requests. As a solution, we proposed new multicast delivery scheme that allows every active client to collaborate with the server regardless of the video that they are watching, alleviating server loads, and therefore server resource requirements. The solution combined the multicast delivery scheme and client-side buffer collaboration in order to decentralize the delivery process. The new video delivering scheme was designed as two separate policies: the first policy used client collaboration to deliver first part of videos and the second policy could merge two or more multicast channels using distributed collaboration between a group of clients. Experimental results show that this scheme is better than previous schemes in terms of resource requirements and scalability.

This work was supported by the MCyT-Spain under contract TIC 2001-2592 and partially supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya- Grup de Recerca Consolidat 2001SGR-00218.