Reliable multicast protocol applied local FEC

One of the most important technical problems in reliable multicast protocols is reducing redundant NAKs (negative acknowledgements) to avoid NAK implosion. A number of NAK suppression mechanisms have been proposed to deal with this problem. In MBONE, which is a virtual multicast network and makes multi-point communication across the Internet feasible, the source link, the links directly connected to or very close to the source, contributes 5% packet loss. In the NAK suppression mechanism, in the case of such a loss, the source link loss, all receivers suffer the same packet loss and the NAK suppression mechanism does not work effectively. In this paper we propose a reliable multicast protocol applied local FEC, called the local FEC, where the source link loss is recovered with the FEC applied locally only to the source link. To investigate the performance of the local FEC, it is compared with the reliable multicast protocol with a conventional NAK suppression mechanism. Our simulation results show that the local FEC outperforms the NAK suppression protocol from the view point of scalability and wasted network bandwidth