Binomial congestion control at receivers for multicast
Bing Zhang, Zengji Liu, Yayan Xu, Li Zhen, Zhang Shi · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
A single rate multicast congestion control for streaming media applications called Binomial congestion control At Receivers for Multicast (BARM) is proposed. Combining aspects of window-based and rate-based congestion control, the protocol shifts most of the congestion control mechanisms to multicast receivers. The main features of BARM are as follows. (1) The protocol adopts binomial algorithm (k=l=0.5, α=0.28, β=0.2 for our implementation) to adjust congestion window, which not only provides TCP-friendliness but decreases abrupt rate fluctuations, making it suitable for real time streaming media multicast applications. (2) The binomial algorithm is executed at the receivers instead of at the sender; to do this, a congestion window is maintained and updated separately by each receiver. Hence the protocol not only has a better scalability but reduces the burden of the sender significantly and is suitable to Client/Server model. (3) The congestion window is converted to the expected receiving rate which is then fed back to the sender if permitted. Compared to window feedback scheme, rate feedback scheme is simpler and increases the scalability. (4) The representative approach is used to suppress the feedback implosion. Simulations results indicate that BARM shows good fairness, TCP-friendliness, smoothness, scalability, and acceptable responsiveness.