Addressing Heterogeneity, Scalability, and Privacy in Layered Multicast Congestion Control

Overview

Multicast is attracting a resurgence of interest because it has a potential to address the explosively growing need for efficient streaming of large-volume Internet content. However, to realize the potential, large-scale multicast distribution requires effective congestion control. This paper designs SIM, a protocol that combines three distinct mechanisms (Selective participation, Intra-group transmission adjustment, and Menu adaptation) to provide a general solution for efficient fair scalable privacy-preserving multicast congestion control with heterogeneous receivers. Whereas the individual mechanisms have appeared in earlier multicast protocols, the main contribution lies in the cohesive integration of the techniques. SIM achieves such integration by operating the three mechanisms at different timescales and distributing the responsibility for control to different entities in the network.