Architectural Issues for Multicast Congestion Control

As multicast applications are becoming more common, multicast congestion control has become an important problem. In this paper, we present an architecture for multicast congestion control schemes. We identify three components that constitute this architecture: namely, the feedback consolidation mechanism, the round-trip time measurement mechanism, and the loss detection and timeout mechanism. We then show how these mechanisms can be implemented for both rate-based and window-based congestion control schemes under various feedback topologies. Finally, we discuss the tradeoffs involved in these implementations when we use the different congestion control schemes (rate-based vs. window-based) and feedback topologies.