Scheduling feedback for scalability and reliability in a streaming multicast protocol

The number of mobile devices accessing the Internet is continuously increasing, creating new problems. For example, when many wireless clients try to access the same video stream in the same hot spot, multicast transmission must be used. However, multicast packets are unacknowledged and may present a high loss rate under adverse conditions which may jeopardize the quality of the streaming. In a severe scenario, packet losses may affect all video frames, preventing the clients from receiving the video stream at all. Therefore, we propose a novel reliable multicast protocol, tailored to streaming applications, that also scales to many clients under the same access point. It uses a feedback repeat request mechanism per client and such requests are adequately scheduled by the streaming server. This mechanism, which is the focus of this paper, also allows differentiating the quality of service provided to the clients, polling their feedback independently. We show experimental and simulation results that confirm the desired scalability and reliable streaming, with efficient bandwidth usage. The results also show a clear superiority in mitigating lost packets with respect to other approaches to the same problem, with benefits reaching and even going beyond one order of magnitude in packets recovery.