EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2004 (2004), Issue 2, Pages 158-175
doi:10.1155/S111086570430911X

Source and Channel Adaptive Rate Control for Multicast Layered Video Transmission Based on a Clustering Algorithm

Jérôme Viéron,1 Thierry Turletti,2 Kavé Salamatian,3 and Christine Guillemot4

 1Thomson multimedia R&D, 1 avenue Bellefontaine - CS 17616, Cesson-Sévigné, 35576 , France
2INRIA, 2004 route des Lucioles - BP 93, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, 06902, France
3Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6), 8 rue du Capitaine Scott, Paris 75015, France
4INRIA, Campus de Beaulieu, Rennes Cedex 35042, France
Received 24 October 2002; Revised 8 July 2003

Abstract

This paper introduces source-channel adaptive rate control (SARC), a new congestion control algorithm for layered video transmission in large multicast groups. In order to solve the well-known feedback implosion problem in large multicast groups, we first present a mechanism for filtering RTCP receiver reports sent from receivers to the whole session. The proposed filtering mechanism provides a classification of receivers according to a predefined similarity measure. An end-to-end source and FEC rate control based on this distributed feedback aggregation mechanism coupled with a video layered coding system is then described. The number of layers, their rate, and their levels of protection are adapted dynamically to aggregated feedbacks. The algorithms have been validated with the NS2 network simulator.