Global QoS management for multicasting applications

Abstract

In a multicast network of a large number of receivers where transmission resources and end-systems are of high heterogeneity, the receivers require automatically selected heterogeneous QoS stream variants that meet their end-system requirements. In this thesis, we introduce a Receiver Satisfaction Driven (RSD) method that takes into account user preferences stored in user profiles in order to automatically select the stream variants that maximize the overall user satisfaction. In the case of a large number of receivers, the receivers may be partitioned into different user classes according to their bandwidth limit. Each class is allowed to send one or several representative group profiles, depending on the number of users in that group. The source processes the data from the group profiles and determines the optimal QoS parameters for a given number of stream variants. Our simulation results show that the streams variants generated based on representative group profiles give a reasonable satisfaction level for all receivers.