Message stability detection for reliable multicast

Many scalable reliable multicast protocols use the local repair scheme where certain receivers retransmit packets by other receivers. Such schemes need a mechanism, called message stability, to ensure reliable delivery to all members of a multicast group and to delete those packets received by all members from the buffers of the local repairers. We propose a new protocol for message stability based on random gossiping. The protocol offers scalabilty and fault-tolerance by limiting each of its message transmissions only to a constant number of randomly chosen group members, hence eliminating message implosion and single point failure through the diffusion of responsibility. Both statistical analysis and simulation study indicate that our gossip-style message stability protocol can be highly effective for large-scale reliable multicast.