Adaptive Group Multicast with Time-Driven Priority

This paper shows how to provide an adaptive real-time group multicast (many-tomany) communication service. Adaptive means that the number of nodes that transmit to the multicast group is continuously changing. In order to meet deterministic quality of service (QoS) requirements of a real-time group multicast, some communication resources are reserved. In this work we show (i) how bandwidth is reserved for each multicast group, and (ii) how an active source can dynamically share the bandwidth allocated to this multicast group with other active group members. Quality of service support for a real-time multicast group is based on time driven priority [7]. In this scheme the time is divided into time frames of fixed duration and all the time frames are aligned by using a global time reference which can be obtained from GPS (global positioning system). Bandwidth is allocated to a multicast group as a whole, rather than individually to each user. The allocation is done by reserving time inte..