Reliable Multicasting via Satellite: Delay Considerations

Abstract

Many different reliable multicast protocols have been proposed and analyzed in the current literature. Since satellites are naturallya braodcast medium, multicast communications have the potential togreatly benefit from their wide-scale deployment. The performance ofreliable multicast protocols needs to be studied and become betterunderstood over networks including satellite links. Most of the analysisperformed on these protocols has dealt with bandwidth usage, bufferrequirements, and processing delay. Very few studies address thetransmission delay incurred from using reliable multicast protocols. Hybriderror control protocols have been studied in terms of bandwidth and delay.The effects of different estimation schemes coupled with autoparityusage are investigated and results are compared. Simple adaptive mechanismsused with a local recovery scheme are found to offer the best overallresults in terms of reducing recovery latency and satellite bandwidth usage.