Multicast Scheme Research Articles

ECast: An Enhanced Video Transmission Design for Wireless Multicast Systems Over Fading Channels

Conventional wireless video multicast schemes face a challenge due to their stair-shaped performance curves called “cliff effect” and the limited ability to accommodate multiple users with diverse channel conditions. Recently, a series of analog video coding approaches aiming to solve the problem have been proposed. In this paper, our goal is to enhance such schemes through a novel cross-layer design. A joint subcarrier matching and power-allocation scheme, which is proved to be optimal in terms of minimizing the mean square error, is proposed. The scheme can dynamically adapt to both channel conditions and video contents and, at the same time, maintain continuous quality scalability. Furthermore, the feedback overhead of the channel state information from multiple users is addressed, and a novel analog feedback method is proposed. The video qualities at various receivers are controllable through assigning different weights to different users. Therefore, this scheme is suitable for wireless video multicast systems. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposal.

Multicast Techniques for Hybrid RF/FSO DTNs

Increasing the contact bandwidth in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) via multicopy routing leads to a decrease in data delivery delay and an improvement in throughput. In DTNs, in which nodes have both radio frequency (RF) and free space optical (FSO) PHY layers, contact bandwidth can be increased by using the FSO PHY as the data channel and performing multicasting. As we show in this paper, due to the highly directional nature of FSO, a naive broadcast strategy where the beam divergence includes all nodes in the broadcast set, it does not always result in the minimization of data delivery delay and the maximization of delivery probability. To this end, we develop multicast strategies for hybrid RF/FSO DTNs via an emulation of static conditions in mobile DTNs in which RF is primarily used for control. We show that the optimal multicast problem in static environments is an abstraction of the minimum weighted set cover problem, which is known to be NP-hard. To save on computation time, we propose a greedy local optimum heuristic. Performance of the various multicast techniques is comprehensively evaluated in a DTN simulator, using the Epidemic routing protocol. These evaluations show that our computationally cheap solution yields results identical to optimal while not compromising the performance of the DTN.

DICE

Coupled with the rapid increase in mobile device users and the bandwidth and latency demands are the continuous increase of devices’ processing capabilities, storage, and wireless connectivity options. The multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) is proposed to satisfy mobile users’ increasing needs. The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is better tuned (than the current Internet Protocol approach) to support multi-RAT communications. ICN eschews the connection-based content retrieval model used today and has desirable features such as data naming, in-network caching, and device mobility–a paradigm ripe for exploration. We propose DICE, an ICN forwarding strategy that helps a device dynamically select a subset of its multi-RAT interfaces for communication. DICE assesses the state of edge links and network congestion to determine the minimum number of interfaces required to perform data delivery. We perform simulations to compare DICE’s performance with bestroute2 and multicast strategies (part of the named data networking simulator, ndnSIM). We show that DICE is the best of both worlds: providing a higher delivery ratio (0.2–2 times) and much lower overhead (by 2–8 times) for different packet rates.

Stateless overlay multicast with in-packet bloom filters

Due to the difficulty of deploying Internet protocol (IP) multicast on the Internet on a large scale, overlay multicast has been considered as a promising alternative to develop the multicast communication in recent years. However, the existing overlay multicast solutions suffer from high costs to maintain the state information of nodes in the multicast forwarding tree. A stateless overlay multicast scheme is proposed, in which the multicast routing information is encoded by a bloom filter (BF) and encapsulated into the packet header without any need for maintaining the multicast forwarding tree. Our scheme leverages the node heterogeneity and proximity information in the physical topology and hierarchically constructs the transit-stub overlay topology by assigning geometric coordinates to all overlay nodes. More importantly, the scheme uses BF technology to identify the nodes and links of the multicast forwarding tree, which improves the forwarding efficiency and decreases the false-positive forwarding loop. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposal can achieve high forwarding efficiency and good scalability.

Demonstration of flexible and reconfigurable WDM multicast scheme supporting downstream emergency multicast communication for WDM optical access network

Demonstration of flexible and reconfigurable WDM multicast scheme supporting downstream emergency multicast communication for WDM optical access network

A congestion-aware and robust multicast protocol in SDN-based data center networks

Continuously enriched distributed systems in data centers generate much network traffic in push-style one-to-many group mode, raising new requirements for multicast transport in terms of efficiency and robustness. Existing reliable multicast solutions, which suffer from low robustness and inefficiency in either host-side protocols or multicast routing, are not suitable for data centers. In order to address the problems of inefficiency and low robustness, we present a sender-initiated, efficient, congestion-aware and robust reliable multicast solution mainly for small groups in SDN-based data centers, called MCTCP. The main idea behind MCTCP is to manage the multicast groups in a centralized manner, and reactively schedule multicast flows to active and low-utilized links, by extending TCP as the host-side protocol and managing multicast groups in the SDN-controller. The multicast spanning trees are calculated and adjusted according to the network status to perform a better allocation of resources. Our experiments show that, MCTCP can dynamically bypass the congested and failing links, achieving high efficiency and robustness. As a result, MCTCP outperforms the state-of-the-art reliable multicast schemes. Moreover, MCTCP improves the performance of data replication in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) compared with the original and TCP-SMO (an alternative reliable multicast scheme) based ones, e.g., achieves up to 1.5× and 1.1× improvements in terms of throughput, respectively.

Design and Optimization for VoD Services With Adaptive Multicast and Client Caching

Multicast and prefix caching are two promising approaches to provide scalable video-on-demand (VoD) services. We contribute to solve the adaptive multicast delivery and the cache allocation problem for VoD services with client caching under asynchronous client requests. We first propose a client caching enabled adaptive multicast delivery scheme, which combines the stream merginglike method with prefix caching and adaptive modulation and coding, to fully exploit the multicast opportunity among asynchronous requests from heterogeneous clients. Next, we derive the bandwidth consumption of the proposed delivery scheme under a given prefix cache allocation and Poisson arrival request. We then optimize the cache allocation to minimize the average bandwidth consumption, and the problem is proved to be convex and solved effectively. Finally, three extreme cases are studied to provide closed-form solutions and more insight on the cache allocation and the delivery scheme for VoD systems.

Efficient and Reliable Multicast Using Device-to-Device Communication and Network Coding for a 5G Network

How to achieve efficient reliable multicast with 100 percent reliability is an important issue of emerging 5G network. In the 5G network, besides the macro BSs, ultra-dense low-power BSs (e.g., micro, pico, and femto eNBs) are deployed throughout the macrocell to form ultradense small cells, which reduces the number of associated multicast receivers per BS and consequenly reduces the number of retransmissions per packet (i.e., traffic load) at each BS. However, this gain is greatly limited by the nodes with bad channel quality. Adopting D2D-communication- based retransmission can effectively reduce the retransmissions at the BSs. There are some challenging issues to be addressed, like the selection of appropriate D2D links, extremely reducing D2D retransmissions, and the design of an efficient acknowledgment mechanism. In this article, considering the ultra-dense small cell deployment in a 5G network, we propose an efficient reliable multicast scheme that jointly utilizes D2D communication and network coding to achieve 100 percent reliability. In addition to discussing research issues that deserve further study, we present numerical results to illustrate the performance gains achieved by applying the proposed scheme in terms of traffic load reduction at the BSs.

Energy-efficient multicast traffic grooming strategy based on light-tree splitting for elastic optical networks

Abstract In order to address the problem of optimizing the spectrum resources and power consumption in elastic optical networks (EONs), we investigate the potential gains by jointly employing the light-tree splitting and traffic grooming for multicast requests. An energy-efficient multicast traffic grooming strategy based on light-tree splitting (EED-MTGS-LS) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we design a traffic pre-processing mechanism to decide the multicast requests’ routing order, which considers the request’s bandwidth requirement and physical hops synthetically. Then, by dividing a light-tree to some sub-light-trees and grooming the request to these sub-light-trees, the light-tree sharing ratios of multicast requests can be improved. What’s more, a priority scheduling vector is constructed, which aims to improve the success rate of spectrum assignment for grooming requests. Finally, a grooming strategy is designed to optimize the total power consumption by reducing the use of transponders and IP routers during routing. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can significantly improve the spectrum utilization and save the power consumption.

Prioritization-based Layered Multicast for Fixed/Mobile Networks with Fast Convergence and Inter-Session Fairness

Multimedia streaming services are becoming popular in both wired and wireless networks. Layered multicast is a widely accepted approach for streaming multimedia data to a large number of users. Existing layered multicast approaches donot interact well with network dynamics. Indeed, upon a change in network conditions, they require a long time till they can appropriately adjust their data transmission rate. Additionally, they do not achieve fairness when users from different sessions share the bandwidth of a bottleneck link.In this paper, we propose a scheme that allows newly-arriving users to promptly converge their data transmission rates to the most optimal rate that best suit the current conditions of the network without degrading the system fairness. The proposed scheme is based on the fact that layered multicast uses prioritybased packet dropping policies. In the proposed scheme, two newly-defined packet messages are considered: “low priority join” and “normal join” messages. To join a session, a user first subscribes to all corresponding layers by issuing “low priority join” messages. It then computes packet drops experienced oneach layer. If packets of a given layer experience a drop rate higher than a predetermined threshold, the user leaves that layer and all higher layers. The user then “officially” joins the remaining layers by transmitting “normal join” messages. This operation helps users to subscrive to only layers whose aggregate bandwidth fits the current network conditions. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through computer simulations and is compared against the Receiverdriven Layered Multicast (RLM) scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves appropriate bandwidth utilization from the start of the session. The results demonstrate also that the proposed scheme is effective in managing handover in mobile networks and achieves better Quality of Service (QoS) inheterogeneous mobile environments.

Impairment- and Splitting-Aware Cloud-Ready Multicast Provisioning in Elastic Optical Networks

It is known that multicast provisioning is important for supporting cloud-based applications, and as the traffics from these applications are increasing quickly, we may rely on optical networks to realize high-throughput multicast. Meanwhile, the flexible-grid elastic optical networks (EONs) achieve agile access to the massive bandwidth in optical fibers, and hence can provision variable bandwidths to adapt to the dynamic demands from the cloud-based applications. In this paper, we consider all-optical multicast in EONs in a practical manner and focus on designing impairment- and splitting-aware multicast provisioning schemes. We first study the procedure of adaptive modulation selection for a light-tree, and point out that the multicast scheme in EONs is fundamentally different from that in the fixed-grid wavelength-division multiplexing networks. Then, we formulate the problem of impairment- and splitting-aware routing, modulation and spectrum assignment (ISa-RMSA) for all-optical multicast in EONs and analyze its hardness. Next, we analyze the advantages brought by the flexibility of routing structures and discuss the ISa-RMSA schemes based on light-trees and light-forests. This paper suggests that for ISa-RMSA, the light-forest-based approach can use less bandwidth than the light-tree-based one, while still satisfying the quality of transmission requirement. Therefore, we establish the minimum light-forest problem for optimizing a light-forest in ISa-RMSA. Finally, we design several time-efficient ISa-RMSA algorithms, and prove that one of them can solve the minimum light-forest problem with a fixed approximation ratio.

Context-Aware Information Diffusion for Alerting Messages in 5G Mobile Social Networks

In emerging fifth generation (5G) systems, mobile social networks are expected to play an important role to enable proximity-based content distribution among devices. In this paper, we address social-awareness aspects and device-to-device (D2D) communications for information diffusion solutions in emergency scenarios. Context-aware information is collected from a set of devices deployed in the environment and received data are integrated and elaborated at the cellular base station before being delivered. In such a framework, we model the expected information diffusion time by taking into account both networking- and sociality-related metrics. In particular, we introduce the so-called social intercontact time which is able to model the interaction frequency between the user and a generic social platform. The proposed approach is compared with alternative solutions where the dissemination process is either managed through direct links from the central base station, as a conventional multicast scheme, or with the support from proximity communications, as a D2D-enhanced multicast scheme. The results of a performance assessment study show that the proposed framework achieves considerable gains, up to 50%, in terms of overall information diffusion time and data rate per user equipment.

Optimizing Subgroups Formation for E-MBMS Transmissions in LTE Networks

Long Term Evolution (LTE) network provides a high throughput with low latency which make it suitable for multicast and broadcast services. In Conventional Multicast Scheme (CMS), data is transmitted according to the user with worst channel condition which results in wasting network resources. To overcome the drawback of CMS, a new subgrouping mechanism is proposed to split the multicast group into several subgroups based on users channel quality. The performance of the proposed mechanism has been evaluated using LTE simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism increase the multicast performance compared to CMS in term of goodput and spectrum efficiency, while maintain fairness index of users in an acceptable level.

Coding for Caching in 5G Networks

One of the major goals of the 5G technology roadmap is to create disruptive innovation for the efficient use of the radio spectrum to enable rapid access to bandwidth-intensive multimedia services over wireless networks. The biggest challenge toward this goal lies in the difficulty in exploiting the multicast nature of the wireless channel in the presence of wireless users that rarely access the same content at the same time. Recently, the combined use of wireless edge caching and coded multicasting has been shown to be a promising approach to simultaneously serve multiple unicast demands via coded multicast transmissions, leading to order-of-magnitude bandwidth efficiency gains. However, a crucial open question is how these theoretically proven throughput gains translate in the context of a practical implementation that accounts for all the required coding and protocol overheads. In this article, we first provide an overview of the emerging caching- aided coded multicast technique, including state-of-the-art schemes and their theoretical performance. We then focus on the most competitive scheme proposed to date and describe a fully working prototype implementation in CorteXlab, one of the few experimental facilities where wireless multiuser communication scenarios can be evaluated in a reproducible environment. We use our prototype implementation to evaluate the experimental performance of state-of-the-art caching-aided coded multicast schemes compared to state-of-the-art uncoded schemes, with special focus on the impact of coding computation and communication overhead on the overall bandwidth efficiency performance. Our experimental results show that coding overhead does not significantly affect the promising performance gains of coded multicasting in small-scale realworld scenarios, practically validating its potential to become a key next generation 5G technology.

Q-CAR: an intelligent solution for joint QoS multicast routing and channel assignment in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks

Multicast routing improves the efficiency of a network by effectively utilizing the available network bandwidth. In multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks the channel allocation strategy plays a vital role along with multicast tree construction. However, the multicast routing problem in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks is proven to be NP-hard. With this paper, we propose a Quality of Service Channel Assignment and multicast Routing (Q-CAR) algorithm. The proposed algorithm jointly solves the channel assignment and multicast tree construction problem by intelligent computational methods. We use a slightly modified differential evolution approach for assigning channels to links. We design a genetic algorithm based multicast tree construction strategy which determines a delay, jitter bounded low cost multicast tree. Moreover, we define a multi objective fitness function for the tree construction algorithm which optimizes interference as well as tree cost. Finally, we compare the performance of Q-CAR with QoS Multicast Routing and Channel Assignment(QoS-MRCA) and intelligent Quality of service multicast routing and Channel Assignment(i-QCA) algorithm in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh network (simulated) environments. Our experimental results distinctly show the outstanding performance of the proposed algorithm.

Fuzzy Logic based Reliable Multicast Routing Protocol (FLRMRP) for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

MANET is a lively effective network implemented with no fixed network infrastructure. Thereby MANET is thin-skinned when attack provokes. Mobility decides the soundness in MANET. In this, paper Fuzzy Logic based Reliable Multicast Routing Protocol (FLRMRP) is formulated to equip staunching execution in terms of stability and mobility. An unfailing multicast backbone is elevated on the basis of convex hull procedure. Arbitrating the link and node reliability empowers the novel routing where stability is on concern. Fuzzy logic control procedure paramount's network performance by enforcing reliability. Fuzzy if then rule procedure appends fuzzy interference system through which reputable system is exposed. By implementing these solutions using Network Simulator (NS2) tool, we have achieved better stability and node connectivity towards the ultimate goal of proposed multicast routing scheme. This reliable multicast routing scheme is proposed for handling link, node failures and malicious attackers in ad hoc networks. The proposed scheme is based on threshold value to maintain the reliable multicast routing which enhances the stability and mobility of the network. And it supports to improve the network performance based on stability of link and node. In general, reliability is measured in terms of mobility of nodes and energy efficiency.

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Cooperative Multicast Millimeter Wave Wireless Networks

Millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless networks can operate in single-cell point-to-multipoint mode to provide local multicast services efficiently. In this paper, the performance of multicast mmWave wireless networks is studied, through stochastic geometry. Then, the use of power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for enhancing mmWave multicasting is also investigated. Furthermore, we study multicasting in two-tier mmWave heterogeneous networks, and propose a novel cooperative NOMA multicast scheme. Analytical expressions for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio coverage probability, the average number of served users, and the sum multicast rate are derived, in order to assess the performance of these schemes. Finally, we discuss the maximum sum multicast rates, by formulating them as optimization problems, and also develop efficient golden section search algorithms to solve them. The offered solutions reveal the impact of data transmission rate and power allocation on the sum multicast rate. Both analytical and numerical results demonstrate that NOMA can significantly improve the mmWave multicasting, while the proposed cooperative NOMA mmWave multicast scheme can further improve the NOMA mmWave multicasting.

M3-Cast: A Novel Multicast Scheme in Multi-Channel and Multi-Rate WiFi Direct Networks for Public Safety

WiFi direct (WD) network is of significant interest during public safety scenarios due to its easy, quick, and efficient implementation. WD provides device to device communication using the MAC and PHY layers specifications of 802.11 standards, which facilitate multiple communications channels and a number of transmission rates to cope with the requirements and challenges of emerging applications in public safety and disaster management. Although they achieve substantial benefits in terms of high throughput, it creates a performance anomaly problem, wherein the selection of a particular communication channel and transmission rate can significantly affect the performance of a wireless communication system. This paper investigates the problem of selecting the most favorable channel and rate for a multicast communication system in the context of public safety using a WD 802.11 network. To this end, M3-Cast protocol is proposed, which refers to a novel multi-rate multi-channel multicast scheme. M3-Cast not only chooses the most favorable communication channel and transmission rate, but also considers the implementation details of the underlying WD technology, thereby optimizing the overall system performance. M3-Cast is formulated analytically and evaluated by a complete system level simulation. The detailed results and the analysis considers a number of performance metrics, such as bit error rate, multicast capacity, and system throughput under different multiple input multiple output configurations, channel bandwidths, and various network radii. Consequently, the simulation and analytical results show that M3-Cast protocol outperforms the standard multicast protocol of WD by almost twofold in terms of system throughput.

A Social-Aware Resource Allocation for 5G Device-to-Device Multicast Communication

With the ever-increasing demands for popular content sharing among humans, device-to-device (D2D) multicast communication, as a promising technology to support wireless services within a local area, is introduced in a 5G cellular network. However, the existing resource allocation approaches for D2D multicast communication usually consider only physical domain constraints but neglect social domain factors, which would result in ineffective D2D links between users unwilling to share interests. Different from existing works, the D2D multicast scheme proposed in this paper will produce effective D2D multicast links by sufficiently utilizing both the physical and social properties of mobile users, with the goal to maximize the throughput of the overall social-aware network and guarantee fairly allocation of the channel between different D2D multicast clusters. The scheme mainly consists of two parts, the formation of D2D multicast clusters and joint optimization of power and channel allocation. In the formation of D2D multicast clusters, members and head in each cluster are selected by taking into account both social attributes and physical factors, such as community, ties, and geographical closeness. In the joint optimization, a two-step scheme is designed to first calculate the optimal power allocation by geometric proximity and then select suitable cellular channels for each D2D multicast cluster utilizing an extended one-to-many bipartite graphs matching algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with heuristic algorithm and stochastic algorithm, the proposed scheme can increase the throughput of the overall social-aware network by about 5% and 50%, respectively.

Distance-Adaptive Spectrum Resource Allocation Using Subtree Scheme for All-Optical Multicasting in Elastic Optical Networks

We propose and investigate a subtree scheme for all-optical multicast routing, modulation level and spectrum allocation (AOM-RMSA) in elastic optical networks. A multicast request is accommodated by several light-trees and each light-tree covers only a part of the destination set. We assume that all nodes are multicast capable and investigate the subtree scheme over the single light-tree scheme for the AOM-RMSA problem under both static and dynamic traffic scenarios. In the static scenario, we formulate an integer linear programming model to obtain the optimal solution. Then, we propose two time-efficient heuristic algorithms that construct subtrees according to the link-sharing ratio between the paths from source to two distinct destinations. The proposed algorithms improve the spectrum utilization by building subtrees that have smaller tree-spanning size and adopt higher level modulation formats. They have also effectively reduced the blocking probability compared to single light-tree schemes.