Enhanced Communications Transport Protocol for Multicast Transport

This paper proposes a new multicast transport protocol, called the Enhanced Communications Transport Protocol (ECTP). The proposed protocol is currently being standardized in the ITU-T SG7 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6. The ECTP is designed to support tightly controlled multicast connections. The sender is at the heart of one-to-many multicast group communications. The sender is responsible for overall connection management such as connection creation, termination, pause, resumption, and the join and leave operations. For tree-based reliability control, ECTP configures a hierarchical tree during connection creation. Error control is performed within each local group defined by a control tree. Each parent retransmits lost data in response to retransmission requests from its children. ECTP has been implemented and tested on Linux machine, along with Application Programming Interfaces based on Berkeley sockets.