Reliable multicasting of continuous data streams
Richard W. Buskens, Muhammad A. Siddiqui, Sanjoy Kumar Paul · Bell Labs Technical Journal · 2002
This paper presents RMTP+, a multicast transport protocol for reliably transmitting continuous data streams from a sender to an unknown number of receivers. The protocol uses a hierarchical grouping of receivers and special designated receivers to keep the sender from becoming overloaded by acknowledgments of data received. Placing the burden of detecting missing data on the receiver rather than the sender enables the protocol to multicast to very large groups of receivers without diminishing performance or reliability. Continuous data streams are transmitted by partitioning each stream into blocks of data and reliably multicasting each block. In this paper, we describe the RMTP+ protocol, analyze its theoretical performance, and detail its implementation for Internet protocol (IP) networks. We also report on experiments measuring RMTP+ performance on production machines in a real network and discuss factors that cause deviations between theoretical and actual performance. An application that uses RMTP+ to distribute call detail information in a large network is also described.