language: en

A Multicast Congestion Control Mechanism Using Representatives

Dante DeLucia Katia Obraczka
Hughes Research Laboratories USC Information Sciences Institute
3011 Malibu Canyon Road 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Malibu CA 90265 Marina Del Rey, CA 90292
email: dante@usc.edu email: katia@isi.edu

Abstract In this paper, we propose a congestion control mechanism for reliable multicast applications that uses a small set of group members, or representatives, to provide timely and accurate feedback on behalf of congested subtrees of a multicast distribution tree. Our algorithm does not need to compute round-trip time (RTT) from all receivers to the source, nor does it require knowledge of group membership or network topology. Through simulations, we evaluate our algorithm with and without TCP cross traffic. This initial evaluation study shows that our algorithm takes advantage of network bandwidth when available, yet does not starve competing flows.

1 Introduction