Title: Multicast congestion control scheme over wireless access links: problem and enhancement

Authors: Yan Liu, Cheng Peng Fu, Zongkai Yang, Bu Sung Lee

Addresses: ITEC, Department of E.I., Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan City 430074, PR China. ' CeMNet, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore. ' ITEC, Department of E.I., Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan City 430074, PR China. ' CeMNet, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore

Abstract: In wireless networks, random loss due to bit error leads to significant performance degradation to conventional multicast congestion control schemes. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of PGMCC (Rizzo, 2000) in wireless access networks, and propose an enhanced multicast congestion control scheme, called PGMCC+, which achieves significant performance improvement over PGMCC over loss-prone wireless access links. The key idea of PGMCC+ is to discriminate random loss from congestion loss according to the measured network congestion level, and take different actions accordingly. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that PGMCC+ achieves significant throughput improvement up to 40% over PGMCC in wireless access links with typical random loss rate 1%. Furthermore, the improved throughput achieved by PGMCC+ is not at the expense of coexisting connections but from the utilisation of available bandwidth that is left unused. In wired environment, PGMCC+ keeps the TCP-friendliness feature of PGMCC.

Keywords: multicasting; multicast congestion control; wireless access links; random loss; PGMCC; wireless networks; simulation; throughput improvement; bandwidth utilisation; performance degradation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIPT.2005.007558

International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology, 2005 Vol.1 No.1, pp.40 - 49

Published online: 03 Aug 2005 *

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