Feasibility study of erasure correction for multicast file distribution using the network simulator ns-2

Reliable multicast protocols on top of the MBone are presently subject to intensive research. One major field of interest is the transmission of files to large sets of receivers. We introduce a Multicast File Transfer Protocol (MFTP), which is gaining increased popularity in the commercial sector and present an enhanced version of the latter, called Multicast File Transfer Protocol with Erasure Correction (MFTP/EC), which uses a low-cost XOR-based erasure correction technique to increase the efficiency of retransmissions. We build a simplified model of the MBone and use the network simulator ns-2 to simulate network traffic in great detail. We validate the characteristics of the simulated network with previous work on MBone measurements and present the performance of MFTP and the gain that can be achieved using our erasure correction scheme.