Performance modelling of reliable multicast transmission

Our aim is to investigate reliable transmission for multicast communication and explore its relationship to multicast routing. We derive two characterizations that enable the comparison of routing algorithms and error recovery mechanisms with respect to the multicast tree topology, namely the probability mass function of successful receptions and the expected number of retransmissions needed to deliver a packet from the source to all receivers. We also give a tight approximation of the computationally expensive expected number of retransmissions. These expressions allow to explore the relationship between routing and error recovery for multicast communication. We finally evaluate the impact of routing algorithms on the performance of reliable multicast transmission and give a realistic generic model for a multicast tree.