PLM: fast convergence for cumulative layered multicast transmission schemes (extended version)

Extended version of the article
A major challenge in the Internet is to deliver live audio/video content with a good quality and to transfer files to large number of heterogeneous receivers. Multicast and cumulative layered transmission are two mechanisms of interest to accomplish this task efficiently. However, protocols using these mechanisms suffer from slow convergence time, lack of inter-protocol fairness or TCP-fairness, and loss induced by the join experiments. In this paper we define and investigate the properties of a new multicast congestion control protocol (called PLM) for audio/video and file transfer applications based on a cumulative layered multicast transmission. A fundamental contribution of this paper is the introduction and evaluation of a new and efficient technique based on packet pair to infer which layers to join. We evaluated PLM for a large variety of scenarios and show that it converges fast to the optimal link utilization, induces no loss to track the available bandwidth, has inter-protocol fairness and TCP-fairness, and scales with the number of receivers and the number of sessions. Moreover, all these properties hold in self similar and multifractal environment.