Multicast congestion control for active network services

The growing interest in multicast applications for the Internet, that will increase with the introduction of active network technology, brings out the need for providing effective congestion control mechanisms. This paper stu dies the problems and specific requirements for multicast congestion contro l. From this study, a general mechanism is proposed and its advantages and compliance with the requirements are described. The general mechanism is th en applied in detail to the Reliable Multicast Active Network Protocol impl ementation. We conclude that active networks provide good support for conge stion control mechanism and that the proposed approach satisfies the stated requirements. However, further work is needed to optimize the values of th e system parameters.