Layered multicast is an efficient technique to deliver video to clients over wired and wireless networks. In this thesis, we consider such a multicast system in which the server adapts the bandwidth and FEC of each layer so as to maximize overall video quality, given the heterogeneous client characteristics in terms of their end-to-end bandwidth, packet drop rate over the wired network, and bit error rate in the wireless hop. In terms of FEC, we also study the value of a gateway which "transcodes" packet-level FEC to byte-level FEC before forwarding packets from the wired network to the wireless clients. We present an analysis on the system, propose an efficient algorithm on FEC allocation for the base layer, and formulate a dynamic program with a fast and accurate approximation for the...[ Read more ]

Layered multicast is an efficient technique to deliver video to clients over wired and wireless networks. In this thesis, we consider such a multicast system in which the server adapts the bandwidth and FEC of each layer so as to maximize overall video quality, given the heterogeneous client characteristics in terms of their end-to-end bandwidth, packet drop rate over the wired network, and bit error rate in the wireless hop. In terms of FEC, we also study the value of a gateway which "transcodes" packet-level FEC to byte-level FEC before forwarding packets from the wired network to the wireless clients. We present an analysis on the system, propose an efficient algorithm on FEC allocation for the base layer, and formulate a dynamic program with a fast and accurate approximation for the joint bandwidth and FEC allocation of the enhancement layers. Our results show that a transcoding gateway performs only slightly better than the non-transcoding one, and our allocation is effective in terms of FEC overhead and bandwidth served to each user.