Reliability in Multicast Services and Protocols ; A Survey

Multipoint communication allows information transfer within a group of peer entities and is becoming more and more relevant in distributed environments. For distributed or replicated data, it ensures an efficient communication without overloading the network. Multicast is defined as a subset of multipoint where a single sender transmits data to a group of receivers. Several classes of multicast services have been defined to respond to application requirements in terms of efficiency, reliability, and performance. This paper surveys protocol functions and mechanisms for reliable multicast data transmission. A multicast protocol basically consists of a three phase protocol (data transmission, acknowledgment, and validation), which can be implemented in various ways. This paper characterizes reliability in the studied protocols. Functionalities and implementation mechanisms are analyzed. The paper concludes with a statement on current developments in multicast Transport protocol and service definitions.