Multicast Congestion Control with Distrusted Receivers

ABSTRACT Congestion control protocols rely on receivers to support fair bandwidth sharing. However, a receiver has incentives to elicit self-beneficial bandwidth allocations and hence may manipulate its congestion control protocol. Whereas the issue of receiver misbehavior has been studied for unicast congestion control, the impact of receiver misbehavior in multicast remains unexplored. In this paper, we examine the problem of fair congestion control in distrusted multicast environments. We classify standard mechanisms for multicast congestion control and determine their potential vulnerabilities to receiver misbehavior. Our evaluation of prominent multicast protocols shows that each of them is susceptible to attacks by a misbehaving receiver. 1