Monitoring-based flow control for reliable multicast protocols and its evaluation

A reliable multicast protocol distributing multimedia data such as software, electronic newspapers, and books without errors to a large number of users on the network is highly desirable. This paper presents a new flow control method that makes such a protocol feasible in real environments wherein receiver functions may degrade and/or network quality may deteriorate. The method involves rate-based flow control such that the server monitors the state of all group members affected by the network performance, and feedback observations in the multicasting rate. The efficiency of the proposed method is confirmed by experimental results.