Scalable Reliable Multicast with Layered Recovery and Low-Overhead Network Delay Estimation
Injong Rhee, Srinath R. Joshi, S. Muthukrishnan, V. Ozdemir · 1999
We study two problems that arise in designing scalable reliable multicast protocols. The first problem we study is that of localizing repair packets when packets are lost. When repair packets are multicasted, a highly lossy receiver may swamp the entire multicast "group" with duplicate repair packets thereby wasting bandwidth; thus, the protocols need repair locality. In this paper, we present a novel multicast layering protocol where the sender proactively distributes FEC repair packets among multiple multicast groups. Receivers can selectively tune in to a subset of these multicast groups to obtain only the number of repair packets they require. We present a highly efficient algorithm that dynamically determines the optimal distribution of FEC repair packets to a given (small constant) number of multicast groups. The running time of this algorithm is independent of the number of receivers in the multicast session, and it is hence scalable. The second problem we address is to estimate...