Stability and fairness issues in multicast congestion control algorithms with multimedia traffic

STAIR is a multicast congestion control algorithm involving both cumulative and non-cumulative layers. The stair layer is the main advantage of the STAIR algorithm, as it does not need IGMP messages to reduce the control traffic for the purpose of congestion control. In this paper we simulated STAIR with multimedia traffic to measure stability, fairness, scalability, and heterogeneity. Our simulation results clearly conclude that STAIR exhibits a high degree of fairness for CBR traffic but shows unfairness in the case of VBR traffic.