Title:  Fine-Grained Layered Multicast

Authors:  John Byers, Boston University
          Michael Luby, Digital Fountain, Inc.
          Michael Mitzenmacher, Harvard University

Date:   1/12/01  

Abstract:

Traditional approaches to receiver-driven layered multicast have advocated 
the benefits of cumulative layering, which can enable coarse-grained  
congestion control that complies with TCP-friendliness equations over large 
time scales.  In this paper, we quantify the costs and benefits of using 
non-cumulative layering and present a new, scalable multicast congestion
control scheme which provides a fine-grained approximation to the behavior of
TCP additive increase / multiplicative decrease (AIMD).  In contrast to
the conventional wisdom, we demonstrate that fine-grained rate adjustment 
can be achieved with only modest increases in the number of layers and
aggregate bandwidth consumption, while using only a small constant number 
of control messages to perform either additive increase or multiplicative
decrease.