A Framework for Routing and Congestion Control for Multicast Information Flows

Abstract

We propose a new multipurpose multicast routing and schedulingalgorithm (MMRS). The routing policy load balances amongstvarious possible routes between the source and the destinations,relying its decisions on the message queue lengths at thesource node. The scheduling amongst various sessionssharing links is devised such that the flow of a sessiondepends on the congestion of the next hop links. MMRSis throughput optimal and computationally simple.The algorithm can be implemented in a distributed,asynchronous manner. It has several parameters which can besuitably modified to control the end-to-end delay, packet lossin a topology specific manner. These parameters can be adjustedto offer limited priorities to some desired sessions. MMRS is expectedto play a significant role in end-to-end congestion controlin the multicast scenario.