Towards an error control scheme for a publish/subscribe network

Many proposals for the next generation of the Internet suggest moving from an end-point oriented to an information-centric oriented architecture. Many of these proposals are based on the publish/subscribe paradigm, which lends itself naturally to native multicast support, a key factor for efficient content distribution. However, the design of efficient reliable transport protocols for multicast is a largely open problem, due to the problem of feedback implosion towards the sender as group size grows. In this paper we propose a hierarchical retransmission-based error control scheme for a native publish/subscribe internetwork. We compare our protocol with similar approaches proposed for IP multicast and evaluate its performance against IP multicast with unicast-based error control.