A multicast congestion control mechanism for reliable multicast

This paper evaluates a congestion control mechanism for reliable multicast applications that uses a small dynamic set of group members, or representatives, to provide timely and accurate feedback on behalf of congested subtrees of a multicast distribution tree. Through simulations, we evaluate our algorithm with and without TCP cross traffic. This study demonstrates that while our algorithm makes use of bandwidth when available, it responds to congestion in a timely fashion thereby limiting data drops. When competing for bandwidth with TCP traffic, our algorithm gracefully relinquishes bandwidth. While not as aggressive as TCP, it does grab a reasonable portion of the bandwidth yet keeps the overall multicast packet loss low.