A Survey of Reliable Multicast Communication

Abstract

The paper reports on recent developments and challenges in reliable multicast communication, with special focus on reliable multicast communication at the application layer. The foundation of reliable multicast communication is given by several components, which are multicast communication, congestion control and error control. Our paper is providing a survey of these mechanisms in multicast environments. I. INTRODUCTION Group communication has emerged as one of the most important developments in Internet. Video conferencing, multimedia distribution, online gaming and long-distance education are today some of the most popular Internet applications, which generate large amounts of traffic. To support these applications, reliable multicast communication is a prerequisite. The purpose is to provide efficient and reliable communication services among a number of users, who are members of a multicast group. Traditional multicast communication demands for the presence of a multicast group, together with associated facilities for reliable multicast communication, to which the users can subscribe and participate. Even though IP multicasting was introduced twenty years ago [14], it is still not widely available as an open Internet service. Problems related to per-group state maintaining, scalability, reliability, congestion control and security have been postponing the wide deployment of IP multicast. On the other hand, other solutions have been developed for multicast service, to compensate for the above-mentioned limitations, e.g., MBone [18]. MBone provides an overlay network, which connects IP multicast capable islands by using unicast tunnel connections. Furthermore, other developments related to, e.g., video distribution and long-distance education, has further pushed the research and development of new alternative solutions for multicast, which are implemented at the application layer. Our paper is a survey on current solutions for multicast communication as well as on solutions for the provision of reliable communication in this context. By reliable multicast communication we mean a type of multicast communication that has included facilities of error and congestion control. The rest of the paper is as follows. Section II provides a survey of multicast communication. Section III presents some This work has been done within the research project "Routing in Overlay Networks (ROVER)", granted in 2006 by the EuroNGI NoE.

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