Adaptive contents delivery protocol for variable-speed multicast trees

Multicast communication is a remarkable technology that can substantially decrease network traffic and can save network resources and transmission costs. Yet exactly for this reason, users of a highly heterogenous network cannot use multicast. This problem in present multicast is solved by setting the transmission speed to the lowest among the available capacities of links in the multicast tree. Some side effects of this is the increase of data transmission time, and, therefore efficiency and real-time-based performance suffer. This paper proposes an adaptive content delivery system over multicast trees and discusses its implementation. Considering some limitations of real network, this paper proposes the use of link capacity measurement. Adaptiveness is based on the measurement and can trigger temporary storage of data in case the discrepancy is found among downstream links originating from the same node.