A Delay Analysis of Sender-Initiated and Receiver-Initiated Reliable Multicast Protocols

A growing number of network applications require the use of a reliable multicast protocol to disseminate data from a source to a potentially large number of receivers. This paper presents an analytic performance analysis of the packet delay incurred under three generic senderand receiver-initiated approaches towards reliable multicast. We focus on the host processing requirements of these protocols and derive expressions for average time between the initial arrival of a packet at a sender and its correct reception at a randomly chosen receiver. Our numerical results indicate that a NAK-based protocol that limits NAK generation by intentionally and randomly delaying NAK packets can achieve substantially higher throughput than the other two protocols examined, and can do so without suffering an appreciable higher delay over a range of system parameters.