Packet Loss Patterns Adaptive Feedback Scheduling for Reliable Multicast

Tree-based reliable multicast protocols provide scalability by distributing error-recovery tasks among several repair nodes. These repair nodes perform local error recovery for their receiver nodes using the data stored in their buffers. We propose a packet loss patterns adaptive feedback scheduling scheme to manage these buffers in an efficient manner. Under our scheme, receiver nodes send NAKs to repair nodes to request packet retransmissions only when the packet losses are independent events from other nodes. At dynamic and infrequent intervals, they also send ACKs to indicate which packets can be safely discarded from the repair node's buffer. Our scheme reduces delay in error recovery because the requested packets are almost always available in the repair node's buffers. It also reduces the repair node's workload because (a) each receiver node sends infrequent ACKs with non-fixed intervals and (b) their sending times are fairly distributed among all the receiver nodes.