Scaling multicast communications by tracking feedback senders

Abstract

This paper looks at the message implosion problem that may happen on large-scale reliable multicast communications. We propose that receivers track the senders of recent feedback messages and store them in a list to determine the back-off interval to send a feedback message. We call our proposal tracked sender list (TSL). The issues regarding this proposal are how many receivers to be stored in a receiver's list, back-off timer intervals, p.d.f selection, and how a receiver stores itself in its list. We analyzed and simulated our proposal using various parameters values in both networks with equal delay and with heterogeneous delays to show the message suppression performance. The results demonstrate that TSL gives a low number of messages over a wide range of receivers even with a short back-off interval and it is not susceptible to packet losses. Our results also show that TSL performs better than other p.d.fs that is used in message suppression.