Configurable active multicast congestion control

A multicast congestion control and avoidance scheme is indispensable for group-based applications to fairly share and efficiently use network resources with unicast applications and maintain the stability of the Internet. It is difficult for the traditional pure “end-to-end” solution to address both TCP-friendliness and inter-receiver fairness [T. Jiang, M.H. Ammar, E.W. Zegura, Inter-receiver fairness: a novel performance measure for multicast ABR sessions, in: Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS’98; T. Jiang, E.W. Zegura, M. Ammar, Inter-receiver fair multicast communication over the Internet, in: Proceedings of NOSSDAV’99] by using only one multicast group. In this paper, we present a novel active multicast congestion control scheme (AMCC). Significantly different from the popular end-to-end congestion control approach, AMCC is a router-assisted window-based hierarchical one. With flexible configuration of parameters and effective use of network resources such as buffers at the active routers, AMCC cannot only behave as a TCP-friendly single-rate congestion control scheme, but also have the benefits of a multi-rate congestion control scheme to achieve inter-receiver fairness by limiting the effect of congestion on a specific link to a small region. In addition, when it is used with reliable multicast applications, AMCC has the special mechanisms to regulate repair packets, which are not specifically addressed by the previous work. We implement and evaluate our protocol in NS2 [http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/].