Performance Evaluation of Layered Multicast Congestion Control Protocols: FLID-DL vs. PLM

Packet-pair receiver-driven cumulative Layer Multicast (PLM) and Fair Layer Increase Decrease with Dynamic Layering (FLID-DL) are two of the recently proposed receiver-driven layered multicast congestion control protocols improved from the famous layered multicast protocols (RLM and RLC). Both have been evaluated by their authors and claim a few advances for layered multicast congestion control protocols. However, there is no known study that evaluates these protocols in comparison. In this work, we overview the receiver-driven layered multicast congestion control mechanism, and illustrate criteria to evaluate the multicast congestion control protocols, such as responsiveness, the efficiency of network utilization, fairness, TCP-friendliness, packet loss ratio, scalability, fast convergence, smoothness and feasibility. Then, performance evaluation is done to compare PLM with FLID-DL using a network simulator (ns2). The simulation results show that PLM outperforms FLID-DL in terms of TCP-friendliness, smoothness, packet loss, fast convergence and efficiency.