SDL modeled hybrid error control scheme for reliable multicast over Internet

With the development of IP multicast and the Internet multicast backbone (Mbone), audio/video conferencing applications become more and more popular. These realtime multicast applications usually have stringent QoS requirements. As one of the most challenging tasks in the QoS guaranteed multicast network, the technology of controlling packet loss has attracted more and more attention. We introduce a new hybrid error control scheme that integrates interleaving, forward error correction (FEC), and threshold based automatic repeat request (threshold based ARQ) to mitigate the error and loss effects encountered in wire and wireless networks. In particular, the threshold based ARQ is studied carefully to shorten the transmission delay in reliable multicast. Moreover, in order to simplify the description and validation of our scheme, specification and description language (SDL) is used for modeling it. SDL depicts different levels of our scheme, from a broad overview down to detailed designs. After the basic algorithms of hybrid error control are devised, the corresponding implementations are developed to achieve the practical performance of our scheme, and the experimental results are analyzed.