Inter-Receiver Fair Multicast Communication over the Internet
Tianji Jiang, Ellen Witte Zegura, Mostafa Ammar · 1999
Multicast protocols target applications involving a large number of receivers with heterogeneous data reception capabilities. To accommodate heterogeneity, the sender may transmit at multiple rates, requiring mechanisms to determine the rates and allocate receivers to rates. In this paper, we develop a protocol to control the rates of a multicast session, with the goal of maximizing the inter-receiver fairness, an intra-session measure that captures the collective "satisfaction" of the session receivers. Our target environment is the Internet, where fair sharing of bandwidth must be achieved via end-system mechanisms and fairness to TCP is important. We develop and evaluate protocols to maximize this measure by maintaining a fixed-rate base group and a variable-rate group. We show that our schemes offer improvement over single-rate sessions, while maintaining TCP-friendliness. 1 Introduction Multicast protocols target applications involving a large number of receivers with heterogene...