A Multicast Congestion Control Mechanism Using Representatives

In this paper we propose a congestion control mechanism for reliable multicast applications that uses a small set of group members or representatives to provide timely and accurate feedback on behalf of congested subtrees of a multicast distribution tree Our algorithm does not need to compute round trip time RTT from all receivers to the source nor does it require knowledge of group membership or network topology Through simulations we evaluate our algo rithm with and without TCP cross tra c This ini tial evaluation study shows that our algorithm takes advantage of network bandwidth when available yet does not starve competing ows