Media Distribution in Heterogeneous Environments using IP-Multicast
Peter Parnes · 1998
This document discusses problems and solutions around distribution of media in heterogeneous environments when using IP-multicast. Keywords: IP-multicast, real-time media, heterogeneous environments 1 Introduction When distributing real-time media with variable bit-rate using IP-multicast to a number of receivers over heterogeneous networks a problem of which bandwidth to transmit with occurs. More precisely, which bandwidth should be used when sending the media stream. If high bandwidth is chosen only the receivers with high bandwidth available the whole way to the sender will be able to receive the stream and those with little bandwidth will not be able to receive the stream. On the other hand, the least common bandwidth for the whole group could be chosen. This would allow for every member of the session to receive the stream but then the high bandwidth users would suffer from degraded media quality. This paper presents an overview of a number of proposals to solve this problem of...