A Distributed Max-Min Flow Control Algorithm for Multi-rate Multicast Flows

We present a distributed algorithm to compute bandwidth max-min fair rates in a multi-rate multicast network. The significance of the algorithm, compared to previous algorithms [1], [21, [3], is that it is more scalable in that it does not require each link to maintain the saturation status of all sessions and virtual sessions travelling through it, more stable in that it converges asymptotically to the desired equilibrium satisfying the minimum plus max-min fairness even in presence of heterogeneous round-trip delays, and has explicit link buffer control in that the buffer occupancy of every bottlenecked link in the network asymptotically converges to the pre-defined value. In addition, we propose an efficient feedback consolidation algorithm which is computationally simpler than its hard-synchronization based counterpart and eliminates unnecessary consolidation delay by preventing it from awaiting backward control packets(BCPs) that do not directly contribute to the session rate. Through simulations we verity the performance of the proposed multi-rate multicast flow control scheme based on these two algorithms.© 2004 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.QC 2012022