A recovery algorithm for reliable multicasting in reliable networks

Any reliable multicast protocol requires some recovery mechanism. A generic description of a recovery mechanism consists of a prioritized list of recovery servers/receivers (clients), hierarchically and/or geographically and/or randomly organized. Recovery requests are sent to the recovery clients on the list one-by-one until the recovery effort is successful. There are many recovery strategies available in literature fitting the generic description. We propose a polynomial time algorithm for choosing the recovery strategy with law recovery latency without sacrificing much bandwidth. We compared our method with two existing recovery methods, SRM (scalable reliable multicast) and RMA (reliable multicast architecture), by simulation and found that our method performs better. Although our theoretical analyses are based on a reliable network, our simulation results show that our strategy performs as well with the per link loss probability in a network up to 20% or more