Fair bandwidth sharing between unicast and multicast flows in best-effort networks

In this paper, we propose a simple scheduler called Service-Based Queuing (SBQ) to share the bandwidth fairly between unicast and multicast flows according to a new definition of fairness referred as the inter-service fairness. We also describe a new active queue management mechanism called Multicast Fair Queuing to fairly share the allowed multicast bandwidth among competing flows in the multicast queue. The simulation results obtained for very heterogeneous sources and links characteristics suggest that, on the one hand, SBQ achieves the expected aggregated bandwidth sharing among unicast and multicast service, and on the other hand the multicast flows remain TCP-friendly. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.