A New Adaptive Layered Multicast Protocol

The popularity of real-time audio and video streaming applications on the Internet has burdened the congestion control mechanisms and highlighted the fairness concerns with misbehaving flows. The type and amount of traffic on the network is causing degradation of services to users in the Internet community. Packet Pair Layered Multicast protocol is based on cumulative layered multicasting that enables the bottleneck bandwidth to be inferred by the use of a packet pair mechanism. Increased complexity in PLM might hinder the deployment of the protocol in the wider network. This is due to the increased state stored in network routers and the propagation of dual packets in the network. In this paper, we discuss the development of the Adaptive Layered Multicast protocol to regulate and distribute available bandwidth to heterogeneous receivers without the complexities associated with PLM.