a receiver - driven layered multicast rate control protocol technique includes receiving an information flow consisting of a group of different layers and detecting traffic congestion and cessation of traffic congestion . one or more of the group of different layers are dropped upon the detection of traffic congestion and one or more of the group of different layers are added upon the detection of cessation of traffic congestion . the dropping consists of forwarding a pause message to an upstream multicast router to instruct the upstream multicast router to discard packets and the adding consists of forwarding a resume message to the upstream multicast router to instruct the upstream multicast router to transmit packets . the adding and dropping may be performed by a local receiver downstream of the multicast router and one or more of the group of different layers may be added or dropped simultaneously in a single operation .