Multicast Congestion Control for Active Network Services

The growing interest in multicast applications for the Internet, that will increase with the introduction of active network technology, brings out the need for providing effective congestion control mechanisms. This paper studies the problems and specific requirements for multicast congestion control. From this study, a general mechanism is proposed and its advantages and compliance with the requirements are described. The general mechanism is then applied in detail to the Reliable Multicast Active Network Protocol implementation. We conclude that active networks provide good support for congestion control mechanism and that the proposed approach satisfies the stated requirements. However, further work is needed to optimize the values of the system parameters.