Abstract
This paper proposes a protocol for the reliableand QoS-aware multicast transport, which is called the Enhanced Communications Transport Protocol (ECTP). The ECTP has so far been developed and standardized in ITU-T SG17 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6. Differently from the conventional reliable multicast, as shownin the IETF RMT WG, the ECTP additionally provides several distinct features such as tight control of multicast session, tree-based error control, and QoS management. For the tight control of multicast connections, the sender is at the heart of one-to-many group communications, and it is responsible for overall connection management such as connection creation/termination, pause/resumption, and the join and leave operations. for tree-based reliability control, ECTP configures a hierarchical tree during connection creation. Error control is performed within each local group defined by a control tree, which was partly designed like the IETF TRACK approach. Each parent retransmits lost data in response to retransmission requests from its children. For QoS management, ECTP supports QoS negotiation for resource reservation, and it also provides QoS monitoring and maintenance operations. ECTP has been implemented and tested on Linux machine, along with Application Programming Interfaces based on Berkeley sockets. For basic testing of the ECTP functionality, we give some preliminary experimental results for performance comparison of ECTP and TCP unicast transports. In conclusion, we describe the status of ECTP experimentations over APAN/KOREN testbed networks
