Multicast in UMTS: Adopting TCP - Friendliness

In this paper, we present a novel mechanism for the multicast congestion control over UMTS networks. The proposed mechanism is based on the well known TCP-Friendly Multicast Congestion Control (TFMCC) scheme. The key challenge in the design of the new scheme lies in improving the TFMCC mechanism to cope with the packet losses caused by either the temporary or the permanent degradation of the wireless channels. The proposed scheme introduces minor modifications in the UMTS nodes with respect to the computing power of the mobile terminals. Finally, our approach is implemented in the ns-2 network simulator and is evaluated it under various conditions.