ON MAX-MIN FAIR CONGESTION CONTROL FOR MULTICAST ABR SERVICE IN ATM

In recent ATM Forum activities, considerable efforts have focused on t he congestion control of point-to-point available bit rate (ABR) servi ce, In this paper, we present a novel approach that extends existing p oint-to-point (unicast) congestion control protocols to a point-to-mul tipoint (multicast) environment, In particular, we establish a unified framework to derive a multicast congestion control protocol for ABR s ervice from a given rate-based unicast protocol, We generalize a known necessary and sufficient condition on the max-min fairness of unicast rate allocation for multicast service. Using this condition, we show that the resulting multicast protocol derived using our framework pres erves fairness characteristics of the underlying unicast protocol, The practical significance of our approach is illustrated by extending a standard congestion control mechanism for ABR service to a multicast e nvironment, The performance of the resulting multicast protocol is exa mined using benchmark network configurations suggested by the traffic management subworking group at the ATM Forum, and simulation results a re presented to substantiate our claims.