Performance comparison of multicast-encouraging Explicit Rate Adjustment and packet-pair layered multicast

Multicast-encouraging explicit rate adjustment (MeERA) and packet-pair receiver-driven cumulative layer multicast (PLM) are two of the recently proposed receiver-driven layered multicast congestion control protocols. Both have used explicit rate adjustment techniques in detecting and controlling congestion. Both have also been evaluated by their authors and claim a few advances. However, there is no known study that evaluates these protocols in comparison. In this work, we evaluate both of them in comparison using criteria such as responsiveness, the efficiency of network utilization, fairness, TCP-friendliness, fast convergence, coordination of receivers behind the same bottleneck link, and feasibility in terms of implementation. Performance evaluation is done using a network simulator (ns2).