Digital audio and video are increasingly common as data that are manipulated in computer and communication systems. Current resource allocation mechanisms for network-based multipoint information delivery are static in nature and cannot support interactivity for each participant. Point-to-point approaches can support interactivity but are inefficient for scaling to a large number of participants. Currently, no techniques have demonstrated the ability to renegotiate and scale service parameters per session in progress as required to adapt to differing terminal equipment characteristics and network congestion. The proposal addresses this problem through the definition of decomposable service groups that permit aggregation of interactivity, terminal characteristics, and levels of service scaling. Interactivity implies the availability of a unique service group. A mechanism is proposed to dynamically reassign elements to service groups based on changing interactivity and session requirements. Such a mechanism will allow the adjustment of service quality based on cost, available resources, or user-equipment characteristics, and will adapt to changing network loading. The proposed approach applies the characteristics of end applications and data storage requirements to the design of a data scaling mechanism. Specific tasks of this research are to (1) formalize a model for characterizing and aggregating service groups, (2) develop a protocol for dynamic service aggregation, (3) identify a mapping for application requirements to service groups and network quality of service, (4) the establishment of a network access mechanism to support service degradation and scaling for multiple sessions, and (5) the simulation, implementation, and evaluation using established multipoint applications and multicast protocols.
