A ring-tree-based acknowledgement mechanism for reliable multicasting

Traditional reliable multicasting is achieved by means of tree-based and ring-based acknowledgement protocols. Tree-based protocol provides good scalability but may incur long communication delays due to the hierarchical acknowledgement path. Ring-based protocol is throughput efficiency but requires large buffer. This paper proposed a ring-tree based acknowledgement mechanism that combined the strong points of both the tree-based and ring-based protocols. The results show that the new protocol is able to achieve the combined strength of its original protocols.