People: N. Natu, H. Raigandhi (to join Microsoft)
Sponsors: Reuters Inc (Paul Stirpe's group), NSF (awaiting)

Publications: None yet.

This Reuters' sponsored project aims at the hotly debated problem of congestion control for reliable multicast. We participate in the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) which has a Reliable Multicast Research Group (RMRG) looking at research issues related to this topic.

The reliability mechanisms for multicast are considerably different than those for unicast (TCP), partly due to the diverse set of applications for which these transports are tailored. Congestion control schemes hence also have a somewhat different flavor. We are studying rate-based schemes for congestion control and performing overhead analysis based upon a well-known reliable multicast scheme, Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) . Related Work. .

Our current work is focussed on coming up with a relaxed notion of TCP-friendliness which allows the construction of more efficient multicast congestion control building blocks. We also aim to build these building blocks as middleware components applicable to an entire class of reliable multicast protocols. We are developing a series of schemes to demonstrate these concepts.

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