Performance Comparison of Reliable Multicast Protocols using the Network Simulator ns-2

Reliable multicast protocols on top of the MBone are presently subject to intensive research. In the past, numerous protocols have been developed and their respective performance been analysed. Little progress has been made, though, to compare different approaches. In this paper, we use the network simulator ns-2 to evaluate the performance of three protocols, namely Scalable Reliable Multicast (SRM), Multicast File Transfer Protocol (MFTP) and an enhanced version of the latter, called Multicast File Transfer Protocol with Erasure Correction (MFTP/EC). We also compare the results to each other and test the suitability for multicast file distribution.