On satellite multicast to heterogeneous receivers

Abstract

We propose a framework for single-source, satellite-based multicast dissemination of bulk files. The framework trades off between reception delay and bandwidth usage and coexists with terrestrial background network traffic; specifically TCP traffic utilizing a short-term congestion control mechanism. The framework consists of two major components: 1) a multicast rate scheduling mechanism that uses longterm, end-to-end multicast packet survival statistics in order to deal with the bandwidth-delay trade-off issue, and 2) a fair queueing algorithm that regulates the points where multicast traffic from the satellite meets terrestrial background traffic. We show through simulation the performance of this framework under a number of scenarios.