A simulation study of a dynamic multicast using FEC

Simulation studies using have been conducted to determine the benefits of integrating reactive forward error control (FEC) with local recovery based reliable multicast protocols, particularly in the dynamic wireless environment, where mobile member may enter in non-covered areas. As the first step, a FEC code was added to a reliable multicast protocol P/spl I.bar/Mul as the base protocol. Originally, P/spl I.bar/Mul's error control mechanism is based on ARQ where the multicast group members periodically respond with a list of missing packets. Also, in the cases when the loss is independent for different receivers, the entire message of ten needs to be retransmitted multiple times. With an ideal FEC scheme, improvement in the transmission efficiency has been observed, By increasing the time out interval of the designated receivers DR, the simulation study shows the lower number of retransmissions in the dynamic environment. Members can leave and join the group based on some distributions.