A RELIABLE MULTICAST PROTOCOL WITH IMPROVED DELAY CHARACTERISTICS

Abstract

This thesis presents a protocol for concurrent and reliable group multicast (many-to-many) from bursty data sources in general networks. In group multicast any node can be a multicast source and multiple nodes may start to multicast simultaneously i.e. asynchronous access to the network. In reliable multicasting the necessary requirement is to ensure that data is received correctly by all the active members of the multicast group. The approach used combines multicast operation along with internal flow control and thus provides the following features: 1. Congestion free multicast dynamic routing with implicit acknowledgements. 2. A node can access all the capacity allocated to it's group with no delay. However, if several nodes are active, the capacity is shared fairly. 3. A node can become active in a transparent fashion i.e. there is no need to explicitly notify the members of the group. 4. Under light load conditions, the multicast should reach all active nodes in a time proportional to the depth of the multicast tree.