Congestion control for fair resource allocation in networks with multicast flows

The problem of congestion control in networks with multirate multicast traffic along with unicast sessions has been addressed in this paper. We present a decentralized algorithm which enables the different rate-adaptive receivers in different multicast sessions to adjust their rates to satisfy some fairness criterion. We propose a one-bit explicit congestion notification (ECN) marking strategy to be used at the nodes. The congestion control mechanism does not require any per-flow state information for unicast flows at the nodes. Per receiver state information may be required for each multicast flow. The congestion control mechanism takes into account the diverse user requirements when different receivers within a multicast session have different utility functions, but does not assume the network to have any knowledge about the receiver utility functions and also converges under certain reasonable assumptions.