Title: Theoretical analysis and comparison of various approaches for reliable multicast

Authors: Laurent Nadeau, Tricha Anjali

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3301 South Dearborn Street, Chicago, IL 60616-3793, USA. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3301 South Dearborn Street, Chicago, IL 60616-3793, USA

Abstract: Scalability is always an issue for multicast protocols. This paper analyses and compares eight protocols for packet loss recovery in multicast communications. The goal of our analysis is to emphasise which protocols provide good recovery times without inducing too much extra traffic in the network, which is the limiting factor for scalability. Assuming the same loss rates on every link in the network, we make a statistical analysis to derive the expected number of packet retransmissions and compare the performance of the protocols. The results show great variations between protocols and provide good insights for the design of new protocols.

Keywords: reliable multicast; reliable transport protocols; scalability; modelisation; packet loss recovery; multicast communications; packet retransmissions; networking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITST.2007.014833

International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, 2007 Vol.1 No.1/2, pp.20 - 48

Published online: 10 Aug 2007 *

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