Adaptive content delivery system with multicasting and buffering for heterogeneous networks

Multicasting is a remarkable technology that can effectively provide point-to-multipoint communications. The multicast communication can substantially decrease traffic in a network and thus save network resources and transmission costs. If multicasting is applied to a content delivery system, however, the transmission speed must be set to the lowest one among the available capacities of links on the multicast tree for all client terminals to receive the contents simultaneously. This type of problem is especially serious for heterogeneous networks. This paper studies effective content delivery systems for non-real-time point-to-multipoint services over heterogeneous environments and proposes an adaptive delivery system to select multicasting and store-and-forward transferring data streams. The results obtained by computer simulation show that our proposed system can reduce delivery time and that it is scalable to large networks and robust against variations in network size as well as environmental heterogeneities.