Packet loss probability for DiffServ over IP and MPLS reliable homogeneous multicast networks

Multicasting has become increasingly important with the emergence of Internet-based applications such as IP telephony, audio/video conferencing, distributed databases and software upgrading. IP multicasting is an efficient way to distribute information from a single source to multiple destinations at different locations. In practice IP is considered as a layer 3 protocol. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) replaces the IP forwarding by a simple label lookup. MPLS combines the flexibility of layer 3 routing and layer 2 switching. In order to provide QoS in group communications for real time applications such as video conferencing, reliable multicasting is used. Miscellaneous efforts have been undertaken to provide reliability on top of IP multicast. Two error control strategies have been popular in practice. These are the FEC (Forward Error Correction) strategy, which uses error correction alone, and the ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request) strategy, which uses error detection, combined with retransmission of data. In this paper, we present a new fair share policy (FSP) that utilizes Differentiated Services to solve the problems of QoS and congestion control when reliable ARQ multicast is used. The results should provide insight into the comparisons of the residual packet loss probability between IP multicast in MPLS networks using FSP and plain IP multicasting using the same policy when DiffServ are adopted and when reliable ARQ multicast is considered.  2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.