The paper addresses the issue of TCP-friendly congestion control mechanism for many-to-many communication environment. Lack of congestion control inhibits deployment of WAN applications that involve collaboration of groups of processes in the Internet environment.

Recent efforts targeted unicast WAN congestion control (TFRC). We extend that approach to multicast many-to-many applications that operate using a middleware framework. Our congestion control mechanism was implemented within a group communication middleware and tested in a multi-continent environment. The measurements have proved the proposed approach to be robust, efficient and TCP-friendly, as well as to provide fairness among processes that compete for shared resources.