Flow control for ABR dispersity multicasting

Dispersity multicasting is an extension of dispersity routing for multicast communication. In dispersity multicasting, m arc-disjoint subtrees are used for source-destination message delivery. If the bottleneck flow control is applied to each of the m arc-disjoint subtrees, there might still exist extra bandwidth for the multicast communication. To exploit the extra bandwidth, we introduce the concept of virtual connections. We design a flow control algorithm for the available-bit-rate dispersity multicasting with two arc-disjoint subtrees and one virtual connection. Issues in applying the algorithm to ATM networks are discussed. Simulation studies show that, in general, our algorithm enhances the throughput of dispersity multicasting