Low-Weight Congestion Control for Multi-sender Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype for single-rate reliable multicast congestion control, which has been built into an existing commercial whiteboard. The prototype was developed using a novel scheme that was engineered around conflicting industry provided requirements for collaborative workspaces. This required the scheme to be both low-weight when used with many senders and compatible with NAT, firewalls and reflectors. The key to overcome this conflict was to combine congestion control and recovery feedback. This differs from many current solutions in that they are often designed for use with a wide variety of protocols and thus operate independent of the recovery mechanism. This paper does not go into the detail required to specify a protocol but instead discusses a few important design requirements for multi-sender applications, which are generally not considered by current research, and describes an approach towards meeting these requirements.