Deterministic QoS guarantees for multicast multimedia applications

In this paper we focus on deterministic Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in terms of end-to-end response time and jitter that can be granted to multicast multimedia applications. These deterministic guarantees are based on a worst case analysis. With regard to the computation of the bound on the end-to-end response time, we first show that the trajectory approach dominates the holistic one, whatever the scheduling policy used in the node. We then design a solution based on this result for multicast multimedia applications subject to end-to-end deadline and jitter constraints. The solution we propose allows to achieve a fair delivery of the multimedia content to a group of clients. This solution is a basic block that can be used to design new interactive multimedia applications, such as live multicast, voting games and question/answer games. Because of the domination property, this solution allows to accept more flows meeting the requested QoS. Moreover this solution can be easily implemented on existing routers.