Multi-rate multicasting with network coding
Subhash Lakshminarayana, Atilla Eryılmaz · 2008
Single-rate multicasting may yield low utilization of the net-work resources when a subset of the receivers creates a bot-tleneck for the whole multicast group. Thus, practical multi-rate multicasting strategies are required to allow users with better channels to achieve maximum performance. While earlier studies have investigated such mechanisms using rout-ing strategies over fixed trees, in this work we consider the possibility of using network coding without a given sub-graph. Our scheme identifies the optimal routes and pro-vides the utility maximizing rate allocation and coding so-lution. We also propose and investigate a nested multicasting method to reduce the complexity of the original scheme for practical implementation.