RCCMP: reliable congestion controlled multicast protocol

Abstract

This paper introduces a new protocol, called RCCMP (reliable congestion controlled multicast protocol). This protocol has been designed to be simple, scalable (NAK suppression), reliable and TCP-friendly. The congestion control is a central part of the protocol, where the feedback of the worse receiver is used to control a transmission window in a TCP-like fashion. The scalability issue is addressed with an exponential tuners scheme, that is also used to estimate the number of receivers involved in the communication. The protocol neither needs support from network elements nor maintains state information dependent of the number of receivers. The paper also presents a number of simulation results on its performance.