Toward the optimal multirate multicast for lossy packet network

Multirate multicast is a powerful methodology of multimedia communication in heterogenous networks. With recent advances of network coding theory, many multirate multicast techniques using network coding have been proposed and they hold promises of improving information multicast efficiency over the traditional application-layer multicast protocols. However, all these network coding based multirate multicast solutions adopted a layered coding technique and involves computationally expensive optimization to decide the amount of information transmitted in each multicast layer. In this paper, we propose a novel multirate multicast framework for lossy networks, which uses both the uneven erasure protection (UEP) technique and linear network codes. The new multicast framework not only simplifies the construction of the multicast codes, but also guarantees the strict fairness among clients of different bandwidths.