Feedback suppression in reliable multicast protocol

Feedback implosion is one of the crucial issues confronting the scalability of reliable multicast protocols. Generally, there are two ways of solving this feedback implosion problem-timer-based and structure-based approaches. In the timer-based approach, when a receiver needs to send feedback, it multicasts the feedback to all receivers earlier than the other receivers, and hence suppresses others from returning feedback in response to the same event. The structure-based approach depends on intermediate network elements to consolidate feedback arising from the same event. It hence significantly reduces the number of feedback messages arriving at the sender from a single event. In this paper, we present an effective end-to-end NACK suppression algorithm which could solve the problem caused by correlative packet loss and independent packet loss among receivers.