Multicast Survivability in Hierarchical Broadcast Networks

Despite the increasing number of applications that benefit from multicasting, most reliable multicast protocols consider omission faults only. This research is concerned with survivability of multicast communication where the communication medium is shared among the hosts. The approach presented specifies that a network with N nodes is resistant against network omissions and malicious nodes if N ≥ 2t + b + 2, where t and b are the number of malicious and benign faulty hosts, respectively. The simulation results show that the network traffic is dynamically adapted to the rate of faults and that the network performs well under omission and malicious faults, unless the rate of faults is high. Furthermore, it is shown that each additional network segment requires (2tg + 1) gateways, where tg indicates the number of faulty gateways. Key–Words: Byzantine agreement, Hybrid fault models, Multicast, Peer-to-Peer networks, Ad-hoc networks