Adaptive Reliable Multicast Using TCP Protocol in Heterogeneous Environments

摘要

An attempt is made to realize highly reliable multicast communications without modifying the TCP protocol, which is now the most widely used in the Internet, and TCP multicast using a GRA (generic router assist) router is proposed. The characteristics of this multicast communications are evaluated, and it is shown that the overall throughput of multicast communications is governed by the bottleneck link in the transmission band. An attempt is made to improve the performance of multicast communications with a bottleneck link, and an environment-adaptive multicast communication scheme is proposed, in which the multicast tree is partitioned at the bottleneck link, and TCP multicasting is performed for each subtree. Performance evaluation by simulation shows that the proposed method alleviates the effect of the bottleneck link on the overall multicast and that the performance of the multicast as a whole can be improved.