Performance evaluation on the satellite based reliable multicast with and without local recovery

Multicasting is an efficient way to deliver data to a large number of receivers. A satellite network has the natural advantage of broadcasting information, on the other hand. We investigate the performance of two satellite based reliable multicast schemes. One scheme has a local error recovery mechanism and the other is without this mechanism. In the scheme with local error recovery, the satellite router operates in a store and forward manner, which minimizes the effect of the large round trip delay of the satellite link. An analytical method called the steady state function method (SSFM) is proposed to evaluate the performance of the both schemes. Simulations results show that the analytical method is accurate for the performance evaluation of the scheme without the local error recovery mechanism. Comparisons of the analytical results also show that the reliable multicast scheme with local error recovery mechanism largely improves on the scheme without local error recovery under the satellite environment