A Rate Adaptation Scheme for Layered Multicast using MSS in Mobile Networks

Layered multicast was introduced to address the heterogeneity problem of network and receivers in multimedia multicast. With highly increasing interest of mobile communication, the need of extending layered multicast to mobile communications has been increased. However, the conventional layered multicast approaches have not considered host mobility, and a handoff can cause stability and fairness problem in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a new rate adaptation scheme using a mobile support station to provide quick resolution of unstable state of a network and fair bandwidth allocation at handoff by priority dropping of less important layers in the outgoing queue and MSS-controlled rate adaptation. The proposed scheme is evaluated using ns-2 [6] and its result shows that the proposed one is superior to RLM in terms of stability and fairness at handoff.