An Adaptive Mechanism for End-to-End Multirate Multicast Congestion Control

One of the most significant challenges that confront end-to-end multicast congestion control is providing a scalable solution that addresses the heterogeneity of the receivers. There exist two categories of rate based multicast congestion control approaches. The first category is a single rate where the source adjusts the sending rate dynamically according to the slowest receiver within the session. The second category is the multirate where the source has to disseminate the data in multiple-layers and each receiver could subscribe to the desired layer according to its own capacities. Multirate mechanisms exhibit better flexibility at the expense of a higher complexity. Furthermore, they are less mature than single-rate schemes. This paper proposes an improved version of a recently proposed scheme SMCC. The first improvement consists of using an equation to estimate the rates of the individual layers. The second improvement is with respect to the join/leave rules followed by the multicast receivers to migrate between the layers. Experimental results show remarkable performance improvement with respect to achieved throughput, without affecting the TCP friendliness property of the protocol.