Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Reliable Multicast Protocol Applying Local FEC

One of the most important technical problems in reliable multicast protocol is reducing redundant feedback information, e.g. NAKs, to avoid feedback implosion. A number of feedback suppression mechanisms have been proposed to deal with this problem. In the MBONE, which is a virtual multicast network and makes multi-point communication across the Internet feasible, the source link, the links directly connected to or very close to the source, is reported to contribute high percentile packet loss. When a well-known NAK suppression mechanism is applied, in the case of the source link loss, all receivers suffer the same packet loss and NAK suppression mechanism does not work effectively. In this paper we propose a Reliable Multicast Protocol Applying Local FEC, called the Local FEC, where the source link loss is recovered with FEC applied locally only to the source link. To investigate performance of our proposed protocol, it is compared with a popular reliable multicast protocol with NAK suppression mechanism. Our analytic performance analysis and simulation results show that our proposed protocol outperforms the NAK suppression protocol from the view point of scalability and wasted bandwidth.