An experimental evaluation of peer-to-peer reliable multicast protocols

Tactical operations often involve the cooperation of multiple actors that need to communicate in a reliable and timely fashion. Numerous critical activities that are performed in this context, such as the dissemination of situational awareness data, or the dissemination of command and control information, present a point-to-multipoint pattern. Therefore, multicast protocols are a suitable approach to perform efficient data dissemination in this context. More specifically, some tactical information requires reliable point-to-multipoint delivery of information. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate four protocols (and corresponding implementations) that have been developed to support reliable multicast communications: NORM, JGroups, OpenPGM, and DisService. We report on two sets of experiments. The first set of experiments measure bandwidth utilization and average delivery time under different emulated network conditions. The second set of experiments performs a more in-depth comparison of the forward error correction approach implemented in NORM with DisService, which adopts an opportunistic approach for information dissemination.