A Simple and Scalable Fair Bandwidth Sharing Mechanism for Multicast Flows

Despite a decade of research and development, multicast has not yet been deployed on a global scale. Among the difficulties with the current infrastructure are intermulticast fairness support, multicast congestion control, and multicast routing. In this paper, we focus on the inter-multicast fairness issue which addresses the way how the network resources are shared between competing multicast flows. We propose a simple and scalable single FIFO queue-based active queue management mechanism called MFQ (Multicast Fair Queuing) to achieve the desired inter-multicast fairness. MFQ interacts with an external multicast bandwidth allocation module which implements a pre-defined intermulticast fairness function. To guarantee a fine-grained packet queuing/dropping, MFQ uses a novel bandwidth sharing notion, called Multicast Allocation Layer (MAL). Based on this notion, MFQ classifies multicast packets into layers and adjusts their weights in order to provide a bandwidth sharing being as c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICNP
• Authors: Fethi Filali, Walid Dabbous
• Keywords: Computer Networks, ICNP 2002, Multicast, Multicast Bandwidth Allocation, Multicast flows