Hybrid Local Recovery Scheme for Reliable Multicast Using Group-Aided Multicast Scheme

In reliable multicast, feedback and recovery traffic limit the performance and scalability of the network. 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) for local recovery. In contrast to original GAM, which only makes use of NACK-based recovery, our scheme produces FEC packets within the scope of a local group, instead of by the original senders. By using this scheme, redundancy traffic can be localized within a multicast session, and the overall recovery traffic can be reduced.