Abstract: A TCP-friendly single rate multicast congestion control for streaming media applications called the Binomial congestion control at Receivers for Multicast(BARM) is proposed. The protocol maintains a congestion window independently at each receiver instead of at the sender, and adopts the binomial algorithm to adjust the congestion window from which an expected receiving rate of the receiver is calculated. To suppress feedback implosion, the representative approach is used. The protocol improves the scalability and reduces the impact of the LPM problem greatly. Simulations indicate that BARM shows good TCP-friendliness, smoothness, scalability, and acceptable responsiveness.

Key words: congestion control, multicast, binomial algorithm, streaming media, TCP-friendliness