On the Applicability of “pgmcc” to UMTS Multicast

In this paper, we investigate the applicability of the Pragmatic General Multicast Congestion Control (pgmcc) scheme to the multicast data delivery over Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks. We show that the pgmcc scheme cannot support the degradation of the radio channels in the UMTS Terrestrial Radio-Access Network (UTRAN). Our major contribution is that the legacy scheme is modified in order to cope with the packet losses caused by either the temporary or the permanent degradation of the radio channel. The proposed scheme introduces minor modifications in the UMTS nodes and respects the limited computing power of the mobile equipment. Finally, we simulate our approach and we evaluate it under various conditions. The simulation results are presented along with their analysis.