Evaluating the utility of FEC with reliable multicast

Forward error correction (FEC) has been proposed as a technique for implementing efficient reliable multicast (RM). However, FEC incurs costs in encode/decode delay and implementation complexity. How much benefit is provided relative to these costs and how dependent is the benefit on the specific RM protocol? In this paper, we evaluate the benefits of FEC for RM, considering both proactive and reactive use with three RM recovery techniques: duplicate avoidance, limited scope multicast and subcast. Our simulation-based results indicate that FEC provides little benefit for an efficient RM protocol like OTERS and introduces extra delay for multi-point streaming data applications.