Message Stability Detection for Reliable Multicast

Many scalable reliable multicast protocols use the local repair scheme where certain receivers retransmit packets by other receivers. Such schemes need a mechanism, called message stability, to ensure reliable delivery to all members of a multicast group and to delete those packets received by all members from the buffers of the local repairers. We propose a new protocol for message stability based on random gossiping. The protocol offers scalability and fault-tolerance by limiting each of its message transmissions only to a constant number of randomly chosen group members, hence eliminating message implosion and single point failure through the diffusion of responsibility. Both statistical analysis and simulation study indicate that our gossipstyle message stability protocol can be highly effective for large scale reliable multicast.