MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

E E C S

Scalable Multicast Video Transmission for the Internet

Steven McCanne
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, April 4, 1996
3:00 PM
Room NE43-518
EECS Special Seminar

Abstract

Large-scale multiparty remote conferencing has become commonplace in the Internet. Two key developments -- the widespread deployment of efficient multicast packet forwarding (i.e., IP Multicast) and the design of new application protocols realized in the "MBone tools" -- have allowed anyone with an "MBone feed" to become an instant Internet-television broadcaster. However, these broadcasts are delivered at a uniform rate to all receivers in the network, forcing the source either to run at the bottleneck rate or to overload portions of the multicast distribution tree. A well-known solution to this problem is to utilize layered source-coding where the network prunes layers from the signal at bottleneck links, i.e., only the number of layers that a given link can support will flow over that link. We build on this idea with an end-to-end rate-adaptive algorithm where the distribution trees are defined implicitly by the receivers. By striping the layers across multiple multicast groups, receivers can adapt to local capacity in the network by joining and leaving groups. Because the scheme is adaptive, both the static heterogeneity of link bandwidths as well as dynamic variations in network capacity (i.e., congestion) are dealt with by the protocol. Unlike previous approaches, our solution requires no explicit support from the network.

I will begin this talk with a brief history of the MBone and our remote conferencing tools (vat, vic, and wb) to establish the design framework for our receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM) scheme. I will then describe the RLM protocol and present simulation results. Finally, I will describe our low-complexity, error-resilient layered source coder, which when combined with RLM, provides a complete solution for scalable multicast video transmission in heterogeneous networks.

HOST: Prof. Stephen Ward

URL of this page: http://www-eecs.mit.edu/AY95-96/events/40.html
Created: Apr 1, 1996 | Modified: Jun 25, 1997
This announcement is from the MIT EECS 1995-96 archive. | Current events
To MIT EECS home page | Your comments and inquiries are welcome.