Fairness of a single-rate multicast congestion control scheme

Recently, a TCP-friendly, single-rate multicast congestion control scheme called pgmcc was introduced by one of the authors. In this paper, we study the fairness of pgmcc in a variety of scenarios in which a multicast transfer session competes with long-lived TCP flows and web-like traffic. We evaluate fairness of the pgmcc scheme at different timescales and compare it with the fairness of the TCP congestion control algorithm. Our results show that pgmcc is capable of sharing fairly the available bandwidth with competing connections. In particular, the use of a closed control loop between the sender and a group’s representative — which closely mimics the TCP congestion control — guarantees that pgmcc is fair to TCP sessions and that it is capable of reacting quickly to changes of network conditions without compromising fairness