Design of a Distributed Flow Control Scheme Based on Wireless Multi-Rate Multicast Networks

With the ever-increasing wireless multicast data applications recently, considerable efforts have focused on the design of self-adaptive flow control schemes for wireless multicast service. This paper proposes a novel and efficient distributed flow control scheme for wireless multi-rate multicast (MR-M), based on the well-known proportional integral and derivative (PID) controllers. The PID controller at each router computes its expected incoming rate and feedbacks this rate to its upstream router, such that the local buffer occupancy can be stabilized at an appropriate value. We give the theoretical analysis of the proposed PID controller in terms of system stability. The proposed MR-M controller achieves the fairness in two aspects: 1) The intra-session fairness, i.e., the receivers from the same source within the same multicast session, if they subscribe networks with different capacities, can receive data at different rates; 2) The inter-session fairness, i.e., the link bandwidth is fairly shared among multiple multicast sessions from different sources. Extensive simulations have been conducted and the results have demonstrated a superior performance of the proposed scheme based on system stability, high link utilization, high throughput.