Performance evaluations of SRMTP for reliable multicasting over satellite networks

A wide variety of network applications require the use of reliable multicast protocols to disseminate data from one source to a potentially large number of receivers simultaneously. Broadband satellite is an ideal transmission medium to support such applications. Although several reliable multicast protocols have been proposed for the Internet, they are not optimized for satellite networks, and the only known protocol developed specifically for reliable multicasting over satellite networks is MFTP. In this paper, we propose a novel set of window-based satellite reliable multicast transport protocols (SRMTPs) for bulk data transfer over broadband satellite networks, with and without the aid of satellite onboard processing (OBP) and buffering (OBB). These protocols employ a judicious combination of negative and positive acknowledgment sent over the shared return satellite channel in a round-robin fashion. Performance evaluation by simulations shows that SRMTP generally outperforms MFTP, especially when it is enhanced by OBP and OBB.