Performance comparison of sender-based and receiver-based reliable multicast protocols

Abstract

This paper analyzes the sender-based and receiver-based reliable multicast protocols for group communications and derives simple analytic formulae to characterize the bandwidth efficiency of the two techniques. The sender-based protocol requires all receivers to return positive acknowledgments (ACKs). This may lead to an ACK implosion problem. The receiver-based protocol requires the receivers to be individually responsible for detecting lost packets and raising repair requests for retransmission. This is more efficient, but requires more effort to implement. The analysis covers the following error recovery schemes: sender-based selective repeat, receiver-based selective repeat and receiver-based go-back-N. The results show that the receiver-based protocol is much more superior than the sender-based protocol. The receiver-based selective repeat performs better than the receiver-based go-back-N. The performance gain is particularly significant when the receiver-based protocol is enhanced with a technique to multicast repair request packets. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.