Signaling protocol for session-aware popularity-based resource allocation

The Differentiated Services model maps traffic into services with different quality levels. However, flows are treated unfairly inside each service, since the Differentiated Services model lacks a policy to distribute bandwidth between flows that form the same service aggregate traffic. Therefore, we present a signaling protocol that fairly distributes the bandwidth assigned to each service, among scalable multimedia sessions in a multicast environment. Fairness is achieved allocating bandwidth based upon the audience size of each session. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed protocol using theoretical analysis and simulation.