Fully reliable multicast in heterogeneous environments

Multicast (1:N) is now supported by a number of networks and communication protocols. A problem in this context is how to provide fully reliable data transmission to the receiver group (or speciied subgroup) in a heterogeneous environment. To achieve this an algorithm is required which is independent of any underlying network and multicast scheme. In this paper we present such an algorithm which provides fully reliable data transfer over Internet style networks as well as over ATM networks. The algorithm was initially inspired by mechanisms proposed for XTP 4.0 and proves to work well using XTP 4.0 protocol mechanisms. To evaluate its feasibility and performance it was tested with a series of simulations and implemented over MBone. The results presented in this paper show that it can provide fully reliable multicast to a relatively large number of receivers on top of diierent networks, protocols and protocol architectures.