An end-to-end reliable multicast protocol using polling for scaleability

Reliable sender-based one-to-many protocols do not scale well due mainly to implosion caused by the excessive rate of feedback packets arriving from receivers. We show that this problem can be circumvented by making the sender poll the receivers at carefully planned timing instants, so that the arrival rate of feedback packets is not large enough to cause implosion. We describe a generic end-to-end protocol which incorporates this polling scheme together with error and flow control mechanisms. We analyse the behaviour of our protocol using simulations which indicate that our scheme can be effective in minimising losses due to implosion, achieving high throughput with low network cost.