Reliable multicast architecture based on multicast gateway

Guaranteeing the reliability of multicast communication is the premise of many applications based on multicast in Internet.Since it was difficult to deploy IP multicast on a large scale in Internet,the authors presented a Reliable Multicast(RM)architecture,which utilized multicast gateways to interconnect IP multicast islands and Application Layer Multicast(ALM)domain.Solutions to key points in the architecture,such as group identification,multicast gateway,group management,error control,and congestion control were also proposed.At the same time,a competitive algorithm for multicast gateway was designed.This architecture could shield the difference existing in underlying multicast techniques and thereby support uniform deployment of reliable multicast services in Internet.