Fair Multicast Congestion Control (M2C)

Abstract

We propose a new TCP-friendly multicast congestion control for very large groups of receivers. This protocol named M2C is layered and receiver-driven. Like TCP, M2C is composed of a Congestion Avoidance and a Slow Start state. However, M2C can re-activate the Slow Start when the current rate is far below the fair one. This protocol is well designed for continuous and long lived data streams, such as multicast IPTV. We study M2C performances in terms of bandwidth-sharing fairness and loss rate. This evaluation shows that M2C is robust and TCP-friendly for most network situations. Besides, we also provide an analysis of the signaling generated. Finally, we compare M2C and WEBRC performances, showing significant improvements.