Summary: This paper describes Adaptive Vegas Multicast Rate Control (AVMRC), an equation-based multirate congestion control protocol that uses a recently proposed TCP Vegas throughput model. The AVMRC protocol exhibits TCP Vegas-like behavior and has the key advantage of operating without inducing packet losses when the bottleneck link is lightly loaded.
The AVMRC protocol incorporates a new technique for dynamically adjusting the Vegas threshold parameters based on measured characteristics of the network. This technique implements fair sharing of network resources with widely deployed versions of TCP such as TCP Reno and might be fruitfully incorporated in TCP Vegas itself to aid in its incremental deployment.
To evaluate the benefits of Vegas-like congestion control, the performance of AVMRC is compared using simulations to that of an analogous protocol that is based on a TCP Reno throughput model. Additional design choices in AVMRC are evaluated along four primary dimensions, namely synchronization policy, delay measurement, data transmission policy, and protocol reactivity.