Optimal Multicast Smoothing of Streaming Video Over an Internetwork

A number of applications such as internet video broadcasts, corporate telecasts, distance learning etc. require transmission of streaming video to multiple simultaneous users across an internetwork. The high bandwidth requirements coupled with the multi-timescale burstiness of compressed video make it a challenging problem to provision network resources for transmitting streaming multimedia. For such applications to become affordable and ubiquitous, it is necessary to develop scalable techniques which can efficiently deliver streaming video to multiple heterogeneous clients across a heterogeneous internetwork. In this paper, the authors propose using multicasting of smoothed video and differential caching of the video at intermediate nodes in the distribution tree, as techniques for reducing the network bandwidth requirements of such dissemination.