Multicast Transport Protocols for Large-Scale Distributed Collaborative Environments

This chapter provides an overview of multicast transport protocols. It also provides an introduction to multicasting and the features that can be added to satisfy each application's requirements. The chapter describes multicast protocols by classifying them according to several features. As the number of applications using multicasting has grown, the number of multicast transport protocols has increased as well. The latter can be classified into three categories, depending on the type of applications: general-purpose protocols such as reliable broadcast protocol (RBP), multicast transport protocol (MTP), reliable multicast protocol (RMP), and Xpress transport protocol (XTP); multicast interactive applications such as multicast transport protocol-2 (MTP-2), real-time transport protocol (RTP), scalable reliable multicast (SRM), and reliable adaptive multicast protocol (RAMP); and data distribution services such as tree-based multicast transport protocol (TMTP), reliable multicast transport protocol (RMTP), multicast file transfer protocol (MFTP), and tree-based reliable multicast protocol (TRAM).