RVMCP: TCP Vegas-like congestion control for reliable multicast

In this paper, we present RVCMP (reliable Vegas congestion controlled multicast protocol) that has been designed to be simple, scalable, reliable and TCP-friendly. The congestion control developed is a single-rate scheme where the feedback of the worst receiver is used to control a transmission window in a TCP Vegas-like fashion. The proposal takes the advantage from TCP Vegas of operating without inducing packet losses as a signal that there is congestion in the network to achieve a better performance. The scalability issue is addressed with an exponential timers scheme that is also used to estimate the number of receivers involved in the communication. The protocol neither needs support from network elements nor maintains state information dependent on the number of receivers