Performance evaluation of active network-based layered multicast congestion control protocol

Active Networks has been used widely as an approach to congestion control. In this work, we evaluate a multi rate multicast congestion control protocol called Active Layered Multicast Adaptation (ALMA). ALMA is an Active Networks (AN) based protocol which uses capsules (active packets) to perform bandwidth adaptation on layered multicast. The aim of the work is to assess ALMA??s behavior in sharing the bottleneck link with TCP and CBR flows by performing simulations on ns-2 network simulator. as well as to reveal the limitations of the scheme. The Jain fairness index has been used to evaluate the inter-protocol fairness of ALMA towards TCP. We found that ALMA has a low fairness index.