Applying deterministic feedback suppression to reliable multicasting protocols

IP multicast is becoming the emerging infrastructure for mass delivery of information. We show that there are certain deterministic methods, namely the reactive window and the proactive window, that guarantee implosion avoidance and provide exposure control, without incurring the overhead of excessive state and timer-based maintenance associated with probabilistic schemes. In order to demonstrate their associated performance advantages, we use both methods for building a simple reliable multicast protocol termed SDMP (scalable dissemination multicast protocol) and compare its performance with PGM (pragmatic general multicast), a protocol that uses probabilistic methods of de-synchronization. Our protocol SDMP: (a) takes advantage of spatial and temporal correlation of network events to deterministically control feedback implosion; (b) uses unicast feedback and hybrid unicast/subcast retransmissions to control delivery accuracy and exposure, thus conserving network bandwidth; (c) provides shorter arrival and recovery latencies; (d) makes use of network-based processing to detect losses and react on behalf of affected receivers; (e) accommodates local-recovery extensions; (f) has formal proof of correctness.