This paper proposes a mechanism for equation-based congestion control for unicast traffic. Most best-effort traffic in the current Internet is well-served by the dominant transport protocol, TCP. However, traffic such as best-effort unicast streaming multimedia could find use for a TCP-friendly congestion control mechanism that refrains from reducing the sending rate in half in response to a single packet drop. With our mechanism, the sender explicitly adjusts its sending rate as a function of the measured rate of loss events, where a loss event consists of one or more packets dropped within a single round-trip time. We use both simulations and experiments over the Internet to explore performance.We consider equation-based congestion control a promising avenue of development for congestion control of multicast traffic, and so an additional motivation for this work is to lay a sound basis for the further development of multicast congestion control.

No abstract

In this paper we introduce TFMCC, an equation-based multicast congestion control mechanism that extends the TCP-friendly TFRC protocol from the unicast to the multicast domain. The key challenges in the design of TFMCC lie in scalable round-trip time measurements, appropriate feedback suppression, and in ensuring that feedback delays in the control loop do not adversely affect fairness towards competing flows. A major contribution is the feedback mechanism, the key component of end-to-end multicast congestion control schemes. We improve upon the well-known approach of using exponentially weighted random timers by biasing feedback in favor of low-rate receivers while still preventing a response implosion. We evaluate the design using simulation, and demonstrate that TFMCC is both TCP-friendly and scales well to multicast groups with thousands of receivers. We also investigate TFMCC's weaknesses and scaling limits to provide guidance as to application domains for which it is well suited.

No abstract

No abstract