Reliable Multicast with Local Retransmission and FEC Using Group-Aided Multicast Scheme

In reliable multicast, feedback and recovery traffic limit the performance and scalability of the multicast session. In this paper, we present an improvement to the many-to-many reliable multicast protocol, Group-Aided Multicast protocol (GAM), with a local-group based recovery by making use of forward error correction (FEC) locally in addition to NACK/retransmission. In contrast to the original GAM, which only makes use of NACK-based recovery, our scheme produces FEC packets and multicasts the packets within the scope of a local group in order to correct uncorrelated errors of the local members in each group of the multicast session, which reduces the need for NACK/retransmission. By using our scheme, redundancy traffic can be localized in each group within a multicast session, and the overall recovery traffic can be reduced.