Elsevier

Computer Networks

Volume 52, Issue 7, 15 May 2008, Pages 1410-1432
Computer Networks

Configurable active multicast congestion control

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2007.12.010Get rights and content

Abstract

A multicast congestion control and avoidance scheme is indispensable for group-based applications to fairly share and efficiently use network resources with unicast applications and maintain the stability of the Internet. It is difficult for the traditional pure “end-to-end” solution to address both TCP-friendliness and inter-receiver fairness [T. Jiang, M.H. Ammar, E.W. Zegura, Inter-receiver fairness: a novel performance measure for multicast ABR sessions, in: Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS’98; T. Jiang, E.W. Zegura, M. Ammar, Inter-receiver fair multicast communication over the Internet, in: Proceedings of NOSSDAV’99] by using only one multicast group. In this paper, we present a novel active multicast congestion control scheme (AMCC). Significantly different from the popular end-to-end congestion control approach, AMCC is a router-assisted window-based hierarchical one. With flexible configuration of parameters and effective use of network resources such as buffers at the active routers, AMCC cannot only behave as a TCP-friendly single-rate congestion control scheme, but also have the benefits of a multi-rate congestion control scheme to achieve inter-receiver fairness by limiting the effect of congestion on a specific link to a small region. In addition, when it is used with reliable multicast applications, AMCC has the special mechanisms to regulate repair packets, which are not specifically addressed by the previous work. We implement and evaluate our protocol in NS2 [http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/].

Introduction

Multicast is an efficient way to support group-based applications. A multicast congestion control scheme is indispensable for a multicast flow to efficiently and “fairly” compete for network resources with unicast flows and other multicast flows. Multicast congestion control is a hard problem. There are two main challenges. Given the ubiquitous presence of TCP traffic in the Internet, the first challenge is how to compete for the bandwidth with TCP flows. This challenge in essence is how to define and implement “fairness” between multicast flows and unicast flows. Previous research [7], [9], [10], [21], [26] discusses the fairness from different points of view. Though each of them gives an insight to the essence of a congestion control algorithm, a formal congestion control algorithm to meet the exact fairness criterion is hard to realize. Most of the proposed congestion control schemes [1], [2], [4], [5], [19], [20], [25] try to conform to the practical criterion “TCP-friendliness [17]”, which stipulates that the arrival rate of a non-TCP flow should not exceed that of a conformant TCP flow in the same circumstances. Given that a multicast session may involve a large number of receivers which may experience different degrees of congestion due to dynamic network traffic and heterogeneous link capacities, the second challenge is how to satisfy the specific interest of heterogeneous receivers in the same multicast session. This challenge is essentially how to define the “fairness” among receivers. Refs. [15], [16] give a definition of inter-receiver fairness. The generic approach to address inter-receiver fairness is partitioning receivers based on their available bandwidth into multiple groups each of which has a different rate [5], [6], [8], [27]. With a pure end-to-end approach, it is hard to address both “TCP-friendliness” and “inter-receiver fairness” for a multicast communication.

The “end-to-end argument [12]” is a main design principle for existing unicast and multicast congestion control schemes. For the congestion control case, it stipulates that the congestion detection and avoidance mechanism should be conducted only by end nodes. This design principle has advantages to insulate applications from the complexity of the underlying communication networks. However, it has the limitation that it prevents applications from exploiting detailed knowledge of the underlying network for performance enhancement. Previous research [13] shows that it is compatible with the end-to-end argument to provide generic customizable service interfaces to users in the intermediate network. More and more researchers agree that a better congestion control scheme can be designed with the help of routers. The trend started initially by designing better queueing mechanisms such as RED [49] and REM [50] and followed by more complex unicast congestion control schemes such as ACC [45], [46] and XCP [48]. RMANP [43], [44] and AMCA [47] are the “active” version of a multicast congestion control scheme. Following the same design philosophy of RMANP and AMCA, this research is based on the similar assumption that the future routers can provide some functionalities and resources for application protocols. These routers are called “active routers” in this paper. They could provide a full fledged active platform as dictated by active networks [14] or they could be an enhanced router with limited system support to some application protocols such as multicast.

In this paper, we present a novel active multicast congestion control scheme (AMCC), which can be used by both reliable multicast applications and unreliable multicast applications. It is designed to achieve good performance with support from active routers. It can adapt to different needs of different multicast applications with simple configuration. AMCC has two main contributions: (i) AMCC can behave both as single-rate multicast and multi-rate multicast. AMCC is the first congestion control scheme to achieve TCP-friendliness and inter-receiver fairness using only one multicast group. With flexible configuration, AMCC can operate at one of three modes: single-rate congestion control, per-node congestion control and per-link congestion control. It is thus able to adapt to different application needs. (ii) AMCC can be used by both reliable and unreliable multicast applications. In particular, when it is used by reliable multicast applications, AMCC has a special mechanism to regulate repair packets which is not specifically addressed by previous congestion control schemes. AMCC can also achieve fair competition among a number of multicast flows when each of them requires the same amount of resources.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we summarize existing related work. In Section 3, we present the protocol details of AMCC. In Section 4, we describe our simulation results. In Section 5, we discuss some protocol features. The paper concludes in Section 6.

Section snippets

Related work

Fairness must be addressed by any congestion control scheme. There are two main theoretical definitions of fairness to dictate bandwidth sharing among multiple network flows: max–min fairness [24] and proportional fairness [10]. It is difficult to construct an effective algorithm to realize the theoretical fairness criteria. Based on the fact that a multicast flow may involve a large number of receivers and potentially could consume significantly fewer resources per receiver than unicast flows

Detailed description of active multicast congestion control

In this section, we elaborate on the details of our protocol and discuss the design alternatives for particular mechanisms. The basic idea of active multicast congestion control is that the source or active routers dynamically choose the representative receiver from all their downstream receivers and use the feedback from the fastest or slowest receiver to adjust forwarding rate to adapt to different degrees of congestion. AMCC can act as a single-rate multicast congestion control scheme by

Simulation results

We use simulation to evaluate the performance. We implement AMCC in NS2 [41] and use the PANAMA active package [42] to simulate the function of active routers.

We have done a wide range of simulation experiments to investigate the behavior of AMCC under different network conditions. In all the experiments, we are interested in how the throughput or average throughput of a node evolves with time and we are concerned with the bandwidth sharing among different multicast and unicast flows in both

Processing cost at active routers

The benefits of AMCC come at a cost. Specifically, active routers need more storage and computing power to store states and perform congestion control operations. The storage spaces decide the capability of an active router to smooth the congestion. Different applications have different requirements on congestion smoothing capability of active routers. Therefore, the exact amount of storage space at an active router actually depends on the requirements of multicast applications. From Eq. (4),

Conclusions and future work

In this paper, we have presented a novel active congestion control scheme for multicast applications. Our protocol can be flexibly configured to perform three types of congestion control: single-rate, per-node and per-link. It can achieve TCP-friendliness and inter-receiver fairness under different conditions using only one multicast group, which is starkly different from previous multi-rate schemes which need to use multiple multicast groups to achieve inter-receiver fairness. Our congestion

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank network research group in University of Massachusetts, Amherst for their PANAMA software package. We are also grateful to anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and useful pointer to references to ACC [45], [46], RMANP [43], [44] and AMCA [47].

Baochun Bai holds a BEng from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and an MEng from Chinese Academy of Sciences and an MSc from University of Alberta. He is now a Ph.D. student in University of Alberta. His current research interest is computer networks, multimedia systems and video compression.

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  • Cited by (4)

    Baochun Bai holds a BEng from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and an MEng from Chinese Academy of Sciences and an MSc from University of Alberta. He is now a Ph.D. student in University of Alberta. His current research interest is computer networks, multimedia systems and video compression.

    Janelle Harms is an Associate Professor in the Computing Science Department of the University of Alberta. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1992 working in the area of resource allocation and performance analysis of networks. Her research interests include performance aspects of network resource allocation, routing and network design problems in wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks and fixed-topology networks.

    Yuxi Li is a postdoctoral fellow with the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning (AICML), in the Computing Science Department of the University of Alberta. He is investigating machine learning techniques for problems in quantitative finance. He received his Ph.D. in the Computing Science Department of the University of Alberta, Canada in 2006. His thesis was on network performance optimization with changing and uncertain traffic demands, for both the internet and wireless networks. He is interested in performance optimization for communication networks. During his Ph.D. study, he received the prestigious Honorary Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, ARC Karl A Clark Memorial Scholarship, and Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship.

    This research is supported by CITR (Canadian Institute for Telecommunication Research) and NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). This is an extended version of our previous work in IC’03 [30].

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