Path-Diversity P2P Overlay Retransmission for Reliable IP-Multicast

IP-multicast is a bandwidth efficient transmission mechanism for group communications. Reliability in IP-multicast, however, poses a set of significant challenges. To address the reliability and scalability issues in IP-multicast, this paper proposes a novel, highly distributed, and lightweight overlay peer-to-peer retransmission architecture that exploits path-diversity by taking advantages of both IP-multicast and an overlay network. An approach that leverages both disjoint-path-finding and periodic selective probing to take into account peer's recent packet loss probability, retransmission delay and recent retransmission success rate is proposed to effectively construct an efficient and dynamic overlay retransmission network. We show that the proposed path diversity overlay retransmission architecture has the potential to significantly reduce the retransmission delay, improve the reliability, playback quality, and scalability of IP-multicast based multimedia applications. Given a deployed IP-multicast network, the proposed overlay retransmission architecture is practical, scalable, and easy to deploy, requiring no change to the existing network infrastructure.