Reliable multicast over satellite networks

In this paper we address the issue of reliable multicast transport over satellite networks. The considered satellite system is a LEO constellation which has been simulated using the network simulator ns in order to analyze the delay characteristics of the system. To enable reliable multicast over satellite networks we propose to use Sat-RMTP. We propose as well to integrate forward error correction (FEC) into Sat-RMTP in order to increase its performance and to reduce the need of retransmission requests. Unfortunately the simulation results show that FEC is unable to fulfil its role in error recovery due to the fact that errors over satellite networks are temporally very bursty. To overcome this problem we propose a new mechanism that we call "error distribution mechanism". This mechanism intends to make loss appear more distributed at the receiver side. To achieve this objective, the sender has to send data out of order so that the probability that many consecutive packets in the same FEC block will be lost simultaneously decreases.