Explicit rate adjustment: an efficient congestion control protocol for layered multicast

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Explicit Rate Adjustment (ERA), a new Multi-rate Multicast Congestion Control (MU-MCC) algorithm. Via ERA, the receiver explicitly adjusts its reception rate accordiug to the network conditions using the TCP throughput equation and Packet-pair Probe. The design goals are responsiveness, elliciency in network utilization, scalability and fairness (including inter-protocol fairness, intraprotocol fairness, intra-session fairness and TCP-friendliness) as well as simple implementation. We have built ERA into a network simulator (nsZ) and demonstrate via simulations that the goals are reached.

Multi-Rate Multicast Congestion Control by Explicit Rate Adjustment and Multicast-encouraging TCP-friendliness

“…We start receiver R1 and R2 at time 3 seconds and receiver R3 & R4 at time 20 and 40 seconds consecutively. This model is the same model we used with the old version of ERA in [13]. Figure 5 shows a very good intra-session fairness and coordination among the downstream receivers of new ERA.…”

“…(1) For every arrival of a packet-bunch, the receiver estimates the available bandwidth (R ' pp ) using the Packetbunch technique mentioned in our previous design [13]. If the subscribed rate is higher than R ' pp , the receiver will immediately reduce its reception rate to avoid overloading the network.…”

“…ERA was one of MR-MCC designs, proposed by Puangpronpitag et al in [13]. The performance study of ERA has been done in [15] and the full version of the design is published in [16].…”

“…Different receivers may subscribe at different levels of their own subscription rates, especially when they are in different network conditions Receiver-driven Layered Multicast (RLM) [10] is the first proposal of MR-MCC. Packet-pair Layered Multicast (PLM) [5], Receiver-driven Layered Congestion Control (RLC) [18], Fair Layer Increase Decrease with Dynamic Layering (FLID-DL) [1], Wave and Equation Based Rate control (WEBRC) [7] and ERA [13] are some previous MR-MCC proposals.…”

“…Multi-Rate Multicast Congestion Control (MR-MCC) has been accepted as a key solution of multicast congestion control for the Internet [8]. Several proposals (such as [10], [5], [1], [18], and [8]) have been made including ours, Explicit Rate Adjustment (ERA) [13].…”