On Satellite Multicast to Heterogeneous Receivers

Abstract

We propose a framework for single-source, satellite-based multicast disseminationof bulk files. The framework trades off between reception delay andbandwidth usage and coexists with terrestrial background networktraffic; specifically TCP traffic utilizing a short-termcongestion control mechanism.The framework consists of two major components: 1) a multicastrate scheduling mechanism that uses long-term, end-to-end multicast packet survival statisticsin order to deal with the bandwidth-delay trade-off issue, and 2) afair queueing algorithm that regulates the points where multicast traffic fromthe satellite meets terrestrial background traffic. We show throughsimulation the performance of this framework under a number ofscenarios.<P><Center><I>The research content in this material will appear in IEEE ICC 2001.</I></Center>