Performance analysis of diffserv multicast (DSMCast) for heterogeneous receivers

Abstract

Internet is a large infrastructure that provides means for global communication. One of the biggest challenges faced in its growth and maintenance is the provision for the best Quality of Service (QoS) to the end-user applications. There exist some mechanisms that have evolved to achieve QoS in IP networks and amongst them Differentiated Services (DiffServ) is a prevalent one. With the increased usage of multimedia applications such as video and audio conferencing, which primarily use multicast mode of communication, one obvious question that arises is whether suitable QoS in terms of resource assurance and service differentiation can be guaranteed to them. This thesis answers the question affirmatively and discusses a recently proposed approach: DSMCast, which attempts to offer QoS for multicast applications in DiffServ domain.

The main objective of the thesis is to analyze how DSMCast provides support for heterogeneous QoS receivers participating in a multicast session. The performance analysis of DSMCast indicates that it can support the heterogeneous QoS requirements for the multicast receivers in a better way than traditional IP multicast. The simulation results bring out an important implication due to the nearness of receivers who have low QoS demands to those who have high QoS demands.