Improving fairness of PGMCC.

PGM congestion control (pgmcc), a single-rate multicast congestion control scheme, is one of the most promising schemes which aim to solve the problem of multicast fairness with TCP. However, by deep investigation, we find that there exist two inappropriate mechanisms in this scheme, which are the fixed slow start threshold (ssthresh) and the mechanism of changing a group representative (acker). Our experiments have revealed the fact that these mechanisms can lead to the unfairness of pgmcc under some network conditions. In this paper, two new mechanisms have been proposed to replace the original ones. One mechanism is to make the sender adapt the value of ssthresh to the network conditions to mimic the action of TCP, and in order to avoid being more aggressive than TCP, the other one is to make the sender reduce the congestion window by half when the acker changes. Our experiment results, parts of which are discussed in this paper, show that the modified pgmcc can achieve better performance than the original one. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]