Pii: S0140-3664(98)00260-6

Time framing strategies such as Stop-and-Go (S&G) [Golestani S.J., Congestion-free transmission of real-time traffic of real-time traffic in packet networks, IEEE INFOCOM, 1990, pp.527-536; Golestani S.J., A framing strategy for congestion management, IEEE JSAC, 9(7), 1991, pp.1064-1077; Golestani S.J., Congestion-free communication in high-speed packet networks, IEEE Trans. on Communications, 39(12), 1991, pp.1802-1812; Golestani S.J., A stop-and-go queueing framework for congestion management, ACM SIGCOMM, 1992, pp.818] and Continuous Framing (CF) [Jau-Hsiung Huang, Biau-Jwo Tsaur, Continuous framing mechanism for congestion control in broadband networks, Computer Communications, 18(10), 1995, pp.718-724] are designed to support the end-to-end delay bound and jitter bound for unicast connections. Considering the features of real-time multicast connections, a new time framing mechanism named Multicast Continuous Framing (MCF) is proposed in this article. S&G and CF allow only one time frame length per connection, but MCF allows changing of the time frame length of a connection at intermediate nodes so that the statistical multiplexing gain within a connection is increased, i.e., the bandwidth requirement can be reduced. We also present the multicast connection setup scheme for MCF in the article. Simulation results show that MCF has a much better performance than that of CF, and the tighter jitter bound a connection requests, the more performance improvement MCF can obtain. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.