Flow/Congestion Control for bulk reliable multicast

摘要

This paper proposes Montiro-based Flow Control (MBFC) to realize flow/congestion control needed for one-to-many bulk reliable multicast (RM) protocols. Bulk RM on top of IP multicast requires flow/congestion control because 1) it needs to adjust to the effective bandwidth to minimize packet losses and retransmission, and 2) to share the link bandwidth with other legacy traffic such as TCP so that RM does not override them aggressively. MBFC is a generic mechanism to implement such flow/congestion control. Thus we think it is very important to provide an effective flow and congestion control mechanism that enables RM traffic to coexist with legacy TCP traffic in Internet. MBFC is based on rate flow control and involves a monitor mechanism to adjust its sending rate. In order to realize coexistene with TCP traffic it mimics TCP's flow/congestion control algorithm, that is, additive increase/multiplicative decrease. To investigate its effectiveness NBFC was implemented in our RM protocol, and a series of simulations were performed in which simultaneous bulk RM and TCP flow were poured.