Hybrid sender and receiver driven rate control in multicast layered video transmission

Layered coding is often proposed as a solution for rate-based congestion control of video transmission in heterogeneous environments. The problem addressed more specifically here is the design of a responsive mechanism for rate allocation in each layer, that would guarantee the best bandwidth usage for all the receivers. One key features, in contrast with existing solutions, are an optimization of the overall PSNR seen by the receivers instead of a measure of goodput. A second key feature is that the optimization does not have to be carried out on the network nodes but only by the sender. Only feedback mergers have to be supported by some nodes in the network leading to a clustering of the receivers according to their bottleneck rate of the rate they are allowed following some TCP-friendliness criteria.