A reliable multicast transport protocol for broadband satellite networks

A growing number of network applications require the use of reliable multicast protocols to disseminate data from one source to a potentially large number of receivers. Broadband satellite networks are well suited to support such applications. Although reliable multicast protocols for the Internet have received much attention, development of such protocols specifically for satellite networks has been rare and is the objective of this paper. We propose a window-based satellite reliable multicast protocol (SRMTP) for bulk data transfer over broadband satellite networks with and without the aid of satellite onboard processing (OBP) and buffering (OBB), and evaluate its performance by simulations. Results show that SRMTP generally outperforms existing multicast protocols such as MFTP. The performance is further enhanced by OBP and OBB.