Fair Distributed Congestion Control in Multirate Multicast Networks

We study fairness of resource allocation in multirate, multicast networks. In multirate networks, different receivers of the same multicast session can receive service at different rates. We develop a mathematical framework to model the maxmin fair allocation of bandwidth with minimum and maximum rate constraints. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for a rate allocation to be maxmin fair in a multirate, multicast network. We propose a distributed algorithm for computing the maxmin fair rates allocated to various source–destination pairs. This algorithm has a low message exchange overhead, and is guaranteed to converge to the maxmin fair rates in finite time