An anycast based feedback aggregation scheme for efficient network transparency in cross-layer design

Abstract

To ensure Quality of Service for multimedia data sessions in next generation mobile telecommunication systems, jointly-optimized cross-layer architectures were introduced recently. Such shemes usually require an adaptive media source which is able to modify the main parameters of ongoing connections by transferring control and feedback information via the network and through different protocol layers from application layer to physical layer and vice versa, according to the actual state of the path between peer nodes. This concept of transmitting cross-layer information is referred as network transparency in the literature, meaning that the underlying infrastructure is almost invisible to all the entities involved in joint optimization due to the continuous conveyance of cross-layer feedbacks. In this paper we introduce and evaluate a possible solution for reducing the network overhead caused by this volume of information exchange. Our soulution is based on the anycasting communication paradigm and creates a hierarchical data aggregation scheme allowing to adapt each entity of the multimedia transmission chain based on frequent feedbacks and even so in a low-bandwitdh manner.