Reliable multicast using IP/ICMP protocol

This paper presents a router-initiated reliable multicast scheme purely based upon the IP layer. As network performance improves in wired networks the chance of link error is decreased and almost all packet losses come from router congestion. Because a router can identify packet contents before they actually drop one, it is possible to recover multicast packets by router interactions before the effect of packet loss is propagated to the receivers. By adding cache in the routers and defining NACK ICMP message lost packets can be recovered by routers. This scheme is much faster than by sender-initiated or receiver-initiated recovery and has smaller latency. Moreover, latency jitter is substantially smaller so that this scheme can improve the recovery performance of real time packets.