A framework for routing and congestion control for multicast information flows

We propose a new multicast routing and scheduling algorithm called multipurpose multicast routing and scheduling algorithm (MMRS). The routing policy load balances among various possible routes between the source and the destinations, basing its decisions on the message queue lengths at the source node. The scheduling is such that the flow of a session depends on the congestion of the next hop links. MMRS is throughput optimal. In addition, it has several other attractive features. It is computationally simple and can be implemented in a distributed, asynchronous manner. It has several parameters which can be suitably modified to control the end-to-end delay and packet loss in a topology-specific manner. These parameters can be adjusted to offer limited priorities to some desired sessions. MMRS is expected to play a significant role in end-to-end congestion control in the multicast scenario.