Study and classification on multicast congestion control

Multicast congestion control is essential to avoid congestion collapse and ensure fair competition in bandwidth with unicast. This paper presents a classification on existing multicast congestion control schemes. A main contribution in this paper is that we characterize multicast congestion control by a parameters tuple {traffic regulation, group management, data layering and coding, router function}. Meanwhile, the advantages and disadvantages are also investigated in the selection of different parameter values, e.g. whether rate-based or window-based, receiver-driven or sender-driven.