AN ETHERNET-ORIENTED RECEIVER-INITIATED RELIABLE MULTICAST PROTOCOL WITH AN EARLY MESSAGE LOSS DETECTION SCHEME

In reliable multicast systems with receiver-oriented reliability approach, the reliability mechanism works based on detection of communication failures by the receivers themselves. Such mechanisms imply that a receiver can detect that it has missed one or more messages by means of a successful receipt of a subsequent message. However, in case some receivers miss the last message and if there is no subsequent message for a relatively long period of time, then the receiver group gets into an undesirable state in which the violation of “all or none” semantics, i.e. atomicity, occurs. This paper proposes a mechanism to prevent such a scenario by introducing a new reliable multicast protocol called RDDP-LAN that provides a loss-tolerant, totally ordered and atomic reliable multicast service for LANs of Ethernet type. To evaluate the system, a prototype of the protocol has been implemented in a Linux environment and investigated. Throughput performance results and the cost of the early message loss detection mechanism are presented.