A Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol for Satellite Communication Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a reliable multicast transport protocol for satellite communication systems. Many of the emerging applications in the Internet would benefit from reliable multicast services, and broadband satellite communication systems have attractive characteristics for supporting such services. However, many of the protocols designed primarily for terrestrial networks do not perform well over satellite networks. Therefore, it is necessary to look at the problem of reliable multicast in the solution space of satellite communications. Our protocol makes use of a special form of forward error correcting codes and couples it with an adaptive window based control mechanism to dynamically adjust the number of encoding packets forwarded to the users. Protocol makes very good use of the broadcast nature of the satellite channel and attempts to minimize the feedback from users. We evaluate the protocol performance by extensive computer simulations.