Multicast transport protocols for high speed networks

This paper presents the design and analysis of three reliable multicast transport protocols for high speed networks. The novelty of these protocols lies in the technique used in combining the acknowledgments of individual destinations along the underlying multicast tree to prevent acknowledgement implosion and in the technique used in preventing unnecessary retransmission by performing local multicasts. These protocols use the periodic exchange of complete state information between the source and the destinations and a block-based Selective Repeat retransmission scheme to improve the overall performance in a high speed networking environment. Performance of each protocol is analyzed in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, buffer requirement, acknowledgment traffic and retransmission traffic. Based on this analysis and the complexity of implementation, one of the three protocols is recommended for reliable multicasting in high speed networks.<>