Reliable Multicast of bulk data: congestion, fairness and freshness issues
Vijay Gupta, Roy H. Campbell · 1999
Network support for reliable multicast of bulk data can aid software distribution as well as server-pushing of web-pages. An important problem which needs to be addressed for facilitating reliable multicast of bulk data is the problem of network heterogeneity in terms of the bandwidth and propagation delays to the different recipients. Prior work in reliable multicast of bulk data either presents solutions to transmit at the rate of the bottleneck link of the entire multicast tree, or assumes knowledge of static bandwidth to each of the recipients. We propose an algorithm which does not make these assumptions but partitions the set of recipients on the basis of the available bandwidths at the time when the multicast is started; and does a separate transmission to each set of recipients sharing a common quality of service (QoS). To the best of our knowledge, this is a first such solution. In order to achieve these goals, we propose (i) an algorithm to divide the set of receivers into cl...