A Survey of Recent Approach in Congestion Control for Multicast Protocol

In this term paper, we present recent issues on congestion control mechanism for multicast protocol. Multicast is sending packets from one or more senders to a group of receivers, rather than dedicating their resources to only one receiver, and thus utilizing limited bandwidth efficiently. End-to-end multicast is one of the most important research areas in distributed systems because many applications will depend on it largely. One of the most difficult issues in end-to-end multicast is congestion control which is providing fair resource allocation in a network, and operating at an acceptable level when there are more requests than the capacity, which the network can handle. Congestion control is an important issue in multicast environment because congestion is more common. Moreover, error free transmission should be guaranteed in case of reliable multicast. In addition, we need to guarantee fairness between best-effort connections and we are likely to see congestion collapses in the absence of proper congestion control mechanism.