Multicast of Multimedia Data

Abstract

The heterogeneous network environment that Internet provides to real time applications as well as the lack of sufficient QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees, many times forces applications to embody adaptation schemes in order to work efficiently. In addition, any application that transmits data over the Internet should have a friendly behaviour towards the other flows that coexist in today’s Internet and especially towards the TCP flows that comprise the majority of flows. We define as TCP friendly flow, a flow that consumes no more bandwidth than a TCP connection, which is traversing the same path with that flow (Pandhye 1999).