End -to -end support for large-scale, continuous media sessions over best-effort networks

The Internet is already being used extensively to transmit continuous media sessions consisting of audio, video, and/or text flows among numerous network users. Because these sessions can draw heavily upon network resources, it is important to design reliable protocols that meet these sessions\u27 requirements while “fairly” utilizing network bandwidth. This thesis examines the extent to which the Internet can support the transmission of large-scale, continuous media sessions via end-to-end protocols. Our contributions are threefold. The first contribution is the development of techniques and protocols that improve reliability for time-bounded delivery of large-scale continuous media transmissions in heterogeneous networking environments. The second is an examination of the impact that multicast layering has on fair network transmission. The third is development and evaluation of techniques that can detect whether or not flows share common points of congestion within a network