Flow Control for Many-to-Many Multicast: A Cost-Benefit Approach
Yair Amir, Baruch Awerbuch, Claudiu B. Danilov, Jonathan Stanton · 2001
Flow control, especially in multicast networks, is a problem of significant theoretical and practical interest. We present a protocol that is analytically grounded, yet also achieves real world goals, such as simplicity, fairness and minimal resource usage. We base our flow control protocol on the Cost-Benefit algorithmic framework for resource management. We base decisions on the ”opportunity” costs of network resources, comparing the cost of each individual resource to the benefit it provides. As opposed to existing window-based flow control schemes, we avoid end-to-end feedback by basing decisions on the state of the links between participating nodes. This produces control traffic proportional only to the number of overlay network links and independent of the number of groups. We apply this algorithm to an existing wide area group communication system, however, it can be applied to other multicast services as well. We show the effectiveness of the resulting protocol through simulations and live Internet experiments. 1