A Receiver Based Single-Layer Multicast Congestion Control Protocol for Multimedia Streaming ⋆

Abstract. The transmission of multimedia content in a multicast environment is still a topic of active research. New congestion control protocols that can support the needs of real time transmission, while keeping the current Internet stability, are needed. While there already exist some protocols suitable for multimedia transmission in unicast communications, and there are also protocols capable of transmitting data to a large number of receivers simultaneously, our protocol is designed for achieving both goals at the same time. In this paper we present a novel protocol designed for multimedia streaming in multicast networks. Our simulation results show that the protocol is compatible with TCP flows, thus preserving the network stability, and is suitable for real-time multimedia transmissions, as it has low oscillations in its throughput and imposes no additional network delays that could increase the latency