Pragmatic general multicast congestion control protocol for wireless networks

Accompanied by the widespread deployment of wireless networks, content and service providers are increasingly interested in supporting multicast communications over wireless network. The reliable multicast protocol can provide (assure) efficiency in data delivery carried by the new generation e-services, such as news, advertisement, guiding messages, etc. Its congestion control function enables the transmissions to adapt the sending rate to the available bandwidth and fairly share bandwidth with the widely used transmission control protocol (TCP) traffic in the networks. Many e-services can be brought and built on the reliable multicast congestion control protocols to the roaming mobile subscribers. However, the reliable multicast congestion control protocols are affected by the wireless packet losses, resulting in degraded multicast performance. This article presents PGMCCW, a pragmatic general multicast congestion control protocol for wireless networks. PGMCCW can differentiate the wireless losses as well as the congestion losses on multicast and can also elect the proper group representative from the multiple receivers in the different wireless sub-networks. The simulation results validate that this scheme is effective to alleviate the influence of the wireless losses and improve the performance over wireless networks.