Reliable multicasting in the Internet: experience with the IRMA architecture

We present our experience with the Illinois Reliable Multicast Architecture (IRMA) reliable multicast architecture. IRMA guarantees reliable, sequenced, and loosely synchronized delivery of multicast streams by supporting TCP as the multicast transport protocol at the end hosts without modifications to the standard TCP/IP stack. To support TCP as the multicast transport protocol, IRMA provides ACK aggregation, local recovery, and network level support for TCP flow/congestion control. We describe an implementation of IRMA, and evaluate its performance in a real network as well as in a simulation environment. The performance result of IRMA indicates that it may be a viable architecture for proving reliable multicast in the Internet