A robust and efficient mechanism for constructing multicast acknowledgement trees

A great variety of todays networked applications require a reliable multicast service. A number of the proposed reliable multicast protocols use a positive acknowledgment scheme, which returns ACKs to the sender to confirm correct delivery. To avoid the well-known implosion problem in the case of large receiver groups, often a tree-based approach is used, i.e., receivers are organized in a tree and ACK messages are passed along the edges of this so-called ACK tree. For building up this tree variations of the Expanding Ring Search (ERS) scheme have been proposed. However, our simulations show that ERS scales poorly. In this paper, we propose an alternative scheme for building up ACK trees. This scheme is based on a so-called token repository service, where a token represents the right to connect to a certain node in the corresponding ACK tree. Nodes that want to join a group just request a token for this group from the (distributed) token repository service. Our simulations show that our scheme causes a much lower message overhead than ERS. Moreover, the quality of the resulting ACK trees in terms of delay and reliability is in many cases higher if generated with our scheme.