Impact of congestion on the stability of a multicast tree in cumulative layered multicast

The authors study the impact of congestion on the stability of a multicast (one-to-many) tree in the context of a cumulative layered multicast system. A stability factor is defined to evaluate and quantify this impact. To obtain the general expression of the stability factor, they develop a simple statistical model. They show that, even in the case of lower link-marking probability, a tree will become more stable when the dependency degree between different links increases. To the best of the authors´ knowledge, this is the first work to quantify a multicast tree´s stability with layered multicast congestion control. The modelling techniques they use are generic, and can be applied not only to analyse the stability of trees in layered multicast systems, but also to design general algorithms for both layered multicast and single-rate multicast congestion control