An auto-configurable hybrid approach to multicast congestion control

We propose a new hybrid congestion control protocol for multimedia streaming. While dominant proposals in the field have generally dealt with either pure single-rate or multiple-rate proposals, these either lack the ability to adapt to heterogeneous receivers or are too complex to be fully understood and safely deployed. Recent advances have suggested the use of hybrid approaches, but so far these approaches fail to take into account the real capabilities of the receivers. Our proposal works by sampling the allowed transmission rate of the set of receivers and adjusting the minimum transmission rate of each multicast group according to these data. Then a single-rate congestion control protocol guarantees in each group the TCP-fairness of the approach.