PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF RELIABLE MULTICAST PROTOCOLS

Reliability issue of multicasting contains the challenges for detection and recovery of packet losses and ordered delivery of the entire data. In this work, existing reliable multicast protocols are classified into three main groups, namely tree based, NACK-only and router assisted, and a representative protocol for each group is selected to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the corresponding approaches. The selected protocols are SRM, PGM and RMTP. Performance characteristics of these protocols are empirically evaluated by using simulation results. A public Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) implementation of RMTP was also performed as part of this study and the protocols were evaluated by investigating performance metrics of distribution delay, recovery latency and request overhead with respect to varying multicast group size and link loss rate.