Achieving fairness in multicasting with almost stateless rate control

Several flow control algorithms have been proposed for attaining maxmin fair rates. All of these strategies use flow specific states at all nodes in the network, and are hence unsuitable for deployment in the current internet. We propose a new approach which attains maxmin fairness in unicast networks while maintaining per flow states at the edge nodes only. Next, we consider multirate, multicast network and argue that any flow control algorithm must use flow specific states at the forking points of the multicast tree. This happens because the packet forwarding rates must be different for different branches at the forking point, and thus the session specific forwarding rates must be stored at the forking point. Finally, we present a maxmin fair bandwidth allocation policy for multirate, multicast networks, which uses per flow states only at the forking nodes, and no per flow state at the intermediate nodes.