An Analysis Comparison of Reliability Mechanisms for Improving Reliable Mobile Multicast Protocols

Abstract

Existing reliable multicast protocols are designed to perform well in wired networking environments. However, in mobile networking environments, these reliable mobile multicast protocols are not optimal as they do not take into account the limitations of power (energy), storage capacity, processing power, impairments of wireless communication channels, and the frequent changes of location and the resulting loss of network connectivity. This paper analyses four hybrid reliable multicast schemes, namely NAK-based schemes, ACK-based schemes, ACK-based schemes with FEC (Forward Error Correction), and NAK-based schemes with FEC that are suitable for mobile networking environments and quantifies their performance. These four schemes differ from the generic sender-initiated and receiver-initiated reliable multicast protocols in that they rely on a mixture of multicasting and unicasting for providing reliability. This analysis is used to show that NAK-based schemes with FEC is best suited for reliable multicasting in mobile environments as they provide excellent performance in terms of average wireless channel utilization and average processing time, independently of the number of MHs.