A Dynamic Approach to Select a Proxy Using Link Properties for Scalable and Reliable Multicast Transport Layer Protocol

Group communications require a reliable multicast protocol that guarantees safe data delivery in a reasonably short time. As these applications grow in use, scalability becomes an important issue. To support these applications, several multicast transport layer protocols have been proposed and implemented. These protocols may suffer from the length of the retransmission paths between source and receivers which yields very high cost for retransmissions. An approach to reduce latency of multicast transport layer protocol is to recover the lost packet locally by requesting local replier. This paper gives the solution that local replier can be selected dynamically based on the link properties such as Bandwidth Delay Product and reliability of link. We measured recovery latency for all loss cases, namely, source, receivers, and links. Results show that the recovery latency is decreased by 17.73% to 40.59%. This percentage of improvement increases linearly, when tree size increases. Also number of duplicate replies received by the receiver is zero when loss is at the receiver and link. This approach also reduces the routing overhead significantly.