Flow/congestion control for bulk reliable multicast
Tetsuo Sano, T. Shiroshita, Osamu Takahashi, Nagatsugu Yamanouchi · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1998
This paper proposes Monitor-based flow control (MBFC) to realize flow/congestion control needed for one-to-many bulk reliable multicast (RM) protocols. Bulk RM on top of UP multicast requires flow/congestion control because 1) it needs to adjust to the effective bandwidth to minimize packet losses and retransmission, and 2) to share the link bandwidth with other legacy traffic such as TCP so that RM does not override them aggressively. MBFC is a generic mechanism to implement such flow/congestion control. Thus we think it is very important to provide an effective flow and congestion control mechanism that enable RM traffic to coexist with legacy TCP traffic in Internet. MBFC is based on rate flow control and involves a monitor mechanism to adjust its sending rate. In order to realize existence with TCP traffic it mimics TCP's flow/congestion control algorithm, that is, additive increase/multiplicative decrease. To investigate its effectiveness MBFC was implemented in our RM protocol, and a series of simulations were performed in which simultaneous bulk RM and TCP flow were poured. The simulation result showed that our rate control policy effectively achieved bandwidth sharing between bulk RM and bulk TCP transfer traffic. We also conclude that 1) setting the transmission rate to the worst receiver leads to an extremely unfair bandwidth sharing occupied by TCP flow, 2) If Rm only experiences a few loses it should not give up its bandwidth, otherwise TCP monopolizes it. 3) It is more effective for MBFC to introduce RED gateways to prevent RM from an aggressive TCP traffic.