We present an efficient method for supporting wireless video multicast services. One of the main goals of wireless video multicast services is to provide priority including dedicated bandwidth, controlled jitter (required by some real-time and interactive traffic), and improved loss characteristics. The proposed method is based on storing multiple differently encoded versions of the video stream at the server. The corresponding video streams are obtained by encoding the original uncompressed

more »

... eo file as a sequence of I-P(I)-frames using a different GOP pattern. Mechanisms for controlling the multicast service request are also presented and their effectiveness is assessed through extensive simulations. Wireless multicast video services are supported with considerably reduced additional delay and acceptable visual quality at the wireless client-end.