Feedback control using representatives and timer in reliable multicast protocols

Feedback implosion is one of the crucial issues related to the scalability of reliable multicast protocols. Generally speaking, in timer-based solutions, when a receiver needs to send feedback, it multicasts the feedback to all receivers early enough, hence suppressing others from returning feedback in response to the same event. In this paper we present an effective end-to-end negative acknowledgment (NACK) control algorithm which could solve the problem caused by correlative packet loss and independent packet loss among receivers