AMRST: adaptive multicast routing protocol for satellite–terrestrial networks

Multicasting facilitates the distributing of multimedia information to an entire set of destinations simultaneously. However, the subsequent mass of Internet traffic usually increases the network congestion and degrades network utilization. The unexpected congestion together with limited network capacity might challenge the provision of multimedia services especially since multicast subscribers are widely scattered. The desired QoS of the ongoing services cannot be guaranteed. To address this challenge, in addition to installing new terrestrial broadband networks, another feasible solution would be to integrate now available broadcasting-oriented broadband satellite networks into the Internet backbone. This paper presents a novel adaptive multicast routing (AMRST) protocol to deliver reliable and adaptive multicast services to global subscribers, based on an integrated infrastructure, called a satellite–terrestrial network (ST network), which provides dynamic bandwidth allocation, flexible resource management and ubiquitous transmission. In the AMRST, a proposed virtual hierarchical routing tree was applied in constructing an efficient multicast tree. A routing decision model was proposed to determine routing path for the member requests. A “hierarchical membership maintenance” approach was designed to maintain the multicast membership. The scalability of the AMRST was further addressed. The AMRST not only kept the benefits of the traditional terrestrial multicast but also promoted the multicasting performance by employing the satellite broadcasting capability. The simulation results demonstrate that the AMRST performed excellently for the ST network.     

Dynamic QoS Allocation for Multimedia Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose an approach to support QoS for multimedia applications in ad hoc wireless network. An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile stations forming a temporary network without the aid of any centralized coordinator and is different from cellular networks which require fixed base stations interconnected by a wired backbone. It is useful for some special situations, such as battlefield communications and disaster recovery. The approach we provide uses CSMA/CA medium access protocol and additional reservation and control mechanisms to guarantee quality of service in ad hoc network system. The reason we choose CSMA protocol instead of other MAC protocols is that it is used in most of currently wireless LAN productions. Via QoS routing information and reservation scheme, network resources are dynamically allocated to individual multimedia application connections.