A new congestion control algorithm for layered multicast in heterogeneous multimedia dissemination

Layered multicast is a promising technique for disseminating adaptive-quality audio/video to multiple heterogeneous receivers. Congestion control in a layered multicast scheme is very important to support heterogeneity and scalability. Previous works on congestion control use packet loss, delay, and receiving rate to infer whether there is spare capacity along the path, which suffers from slow convergence, lack of inter-session fairness or TCP-fairness, layer oscillations, and loss induced by the join experiments. In this paper, we propose a layered multicast bandwidth inference congestion (BIC) control, which use delay increasing trend detection to infer the spare capacity. The major contribution of this paper is introducing the source probe organization and effective spare capacity inference by delay trend detection algorithm. We evaluate BIC for a large variety of scenarios and show that it converges fast to the optimal link utilization and can adapt to network dynamics effectively. We also show that BIC is stable, inter-session fair and fair to competing TCP traffics.