Reliable data transfer mechanism on dynamic nodes based overlay multicast

Abstract

IP multicast is a technique that can transmit one copy of data traffic to multiple receivers at one time. Because it can greatly save the network bandwidth consumption and many applications are inherently multicast-based, it has been a research focus since the idea was proposed. However, because of many reasons, such as management, security, inter-domain routing, etc, it has not been widely deployed. Recently, many researchers have put their research focus on overlay multicast. In overlay multicast, the data replication, multicast routing, group management and other functions are all achieved at application layer. Because it does not require any change to the current Internet infrastructure, it can be easily deployed. Since the idea was proposed, many overlay multicast ideas have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a method for reliable data transfer on overlay multicast. It applies TCP at transfer-layer and local data buffering at application-layer. This paper explains the advantages and disadvantage of using TCP for reliable data transfer on overlay multicast, then, describes the operation of our method and induces an optimal buffer size in dynamic nodes based overlay multicast. Finally, we check the effect of data buffering with experiments on several models.