Cooperative control of multicast-based streaming on-demand systems

This paper proposes the COoperative COntrol Protocol (COCOP), which enables a synchronous cooperative group to interactively control an on-demand server which multicasts time-dependent data streams. Multicast-based streaming on-demand systems such as video on-demand systems, web casters, and networks of real/virtual sensors can beneficially exploit COCOP to provide cooperative control sessions as a mainstream service. In order to improve efficiency and scalability, the protocol relies on a reliable multicast transport layer which can be based either on the IP-multicast or on Application Layer Multicast. Performance evaluation of COCOP was carried out on multicast trees by using a discrete-event simulation framework.