Delay-based Flow Control for Layered Multicast Applications

This paper presents an approach to flow control for real-time, loss-sensitive, layered multicast applications. The fundamentals of flow control for multicast applications are related and a novel delaybased flow control algorithm is introduced. The basic idea of the algorithm is to react to incipient congestion before packet loss occurs by monitoring variations in the one-way packet delay from sender to receivers. By using a hierarchical representation of the real-time data in combination with a layered multicast transmission model the flow control algorithm can be implemented entirely in the receivers. Furthermore, by constraining the bandwidth of the layers to a well-defined rate, the congestion control can be accomplished almost entirely without packet loss. This is particularly suitable for real-time multimedia conferencing applications that are inherently multipoint and loss-sensitive. The performance of the flow control algorithm in terms of link utilization, interand intra-protocol fairness, session scalability and loss probability is evaluated through extensive simulation.

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