Using NATO! for Partially Reliable Large Scale Multicast Streaming in Broadcast Wireless Networks

Streaming multicast is one of the most important Transport layer services in future broadcast wireless networks. This service enables the delivery of real-time voice and video applications to an almost unlimited number of mobile devices, by taking advantage of a base station's ability to transmit a single packet to all the nodes in its cell. While strict delivery assurance is not necessary and not possible for such applications, some level of assurance is provided using Transport layer FEC (Forward Error Correction) codes. In this paper we show how to improve the performance of large-scale partially reliable multicast streaming in broadcast wireless networks, using the NATO! scheme. NATO!, presented in another paper, is a generic real-time scheme that allows a node to estimate the size of any subset of nodes affected by the same event using a few messages received from this subset.