A rate allocation protocol using competitive pricing for improving performance of multicast sessions

Rate allocation using the Max-Min fairness criterion may highly discriminate against multicast and long unicast sessions and may lead to severe network underutilization. In this paper, we present a solution for rate allocation that is based on competitive pricing. The resultant allocation increases fairness towards multicast sessions and improves network utilization considerably. The solution requires no re-routing of sessions. The economy on which we base our solution is simple enough, enabling its implementation for practical use. We present a distributed asynchronous protocol suitable for the ATM ABR service, which achieves the economy's allocation efficiently and with short convergence time.