A Literature Review of Recent Developments in Reliable Multicast Error Handling

As the number of applications directed towards group collaboration and group media dissemination increases, the interest for multicast protocols has also grown during recent years. Several applications have a need for reliability. This is true for the use of shared network editors, shared white-boards, networked games, etc. An increased popularity of media and application distribution over the Internet and the beginning growth of mobile computing with its inherent inhomogeneity and higher loss-rate, will create a demand for security which will increase the need for reliable transmissions. This paper aims to study reliable multicast protocols from an error correction perspective. During recent years, a number of protocols have been proposed. The reliability properties of these lies partly with error correction measures, but to a great extent also with different topological and timing measures which are aimed at boosting protocol efficiency. As it turns out, there are mainly two groups of error correction measures which are used. They can be divided into reactive measures, and proactive. The development in this field of research is very fast. Although a number of studies have already been done, this paper aims to summarise the most recent developments in the area of reliable multicast. This is a literature study and the sources are mainly English-language references from the INSPEC database and the ACM, IEEE, and IEEE Computer Society’s digital libraries, essentially from 1997 until 2000.