Multicast synchronous transfer protocol: a complete study of packet delay and packet loss behavior

In this paper, we study a multicast transport protocol called MUST (multicast synchronous transfer), which offers multicast synchronous file transfer service to the application layer, in an intra-campus environment. For an efficient bandwidth utilization, MUST transmits IP packets by using multicast addressing. Also, it achieves a notable acknowledgement packets reduction by an appropriate mechanism. Flow control and error recovery algorithms are also developed to satisfy features such as reliability, high throughput and low delay. We present in this work some test results of the protocol transfer delay, some flow control features and the UDP buffer overflow probability (this last parameter is also verified by simulation). We also compare the experimental and simulation results with a mathematical model, validating analytically the most important protocol parameters.