Rate and end-to-end delay control for multicast and unicast flows

There is growing evidence that a new generation of potentially high-revenue applications are emerging that can benefit from widespread multicast support in large IP networks. These applications, such as streaming video and interactive games, have inherent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Current methods of QoS provisioning have either scalability concerns or cannot guarantee end-to-end delay with acceptable packet loss unless bandwidth is over-provisioned. While low jitter guarantee is sufficient for streaming applications, maximum end-to-end delay is also required for interactive games. Previously, we presented a new holistic architecture for end-to-end QoS guarantee for unicast flows only in the core network based on several novel combined rate and end-to-end delay control algorithms. We also demonstrated the viability of this architecture and its advantage over Differentiated Services by implementing it in edge and core routers and monitoring the rate, end-to-end delay and packet loss of all flows in a six-node core network with long delay links. Here, we extend the architecture to include multicast flows and demonstrate that network operators can tune the architectural configuration parameters so as to fairly share the excess bandwidth between multicast and unicast flows.