The impact of routing on multicast error recovery

We investigate the relationship between multicast routing algorithms and reliable multicast communication. To capture the impact of the multicast tree topology onto reliable multicast, we consider two performance measures, namely the probability mass function of successful receptions and the expected number of retransmissions needed to successfully deliver a packet from the source to all receivers. Since the expected number of retransmissions is computationally expensive we also give a tight approximation. We nally evaluate the impact of routing algorithms on the performance of reliable multicast transmission and propose a realistic generic model for a multicast tree.