An efficient rate-based algorithm for point-to-multipoint ABR service

A new efficient consolidation algorithm at a branch-point switch for point-to-multipoint available bit rate (ABR) service is proposed. In the scheme, among the received backward resource management (RM) cells with the same sequence number, each branch point passes only one of them, so that the source gets exactly one backward RM cell corresponding to every forward RM cell it generates. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a faster response to congestion status and a lower consolidation noise compared with the existing algorithms, particularly in network environments with a large number of branch points on a path.