Proactive FEC-based forwarding for the collaborative reliable multicast protocol

The collaborative reliable multicast protocol (CRM) has been designed for reliable delivery of multicast traffic in a heterogeneous network environment. One feature of this protocol is the incorporation of forward error correction (FEC). CRM incorporates FEC with a forwarding service to support nodes that are under emission control, or which are connected by links that are high capacity in the forward direction but are very low capacity in the reverse direction. For this case, the use of FEC is shown to provide reliable data delivery, and is more efficient than other techniques such as redundant data transmissions. The forwarding service computes FEC on an aggregate stream of data, which increases the likelihood of being able to compute FEC even for the small amount of data generated by interactive collaborative applications.