A Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-weight Sessions and Application Level Framing

This paper describes SRM, an algorithm designed to support scalable, reliable multicast delivery. The authors importantly explain that several integral TCP parameters lose meaning in a multicast environment; for example, the round-trip time used for retransmission or the delay-bandwidth product is difficult to pinpoint when receivers have several orders of difference in magnitude. For this reason, receiver-based control is preferred to the traditional sender-based, fate-sharing approach. The SRM framework builds upon application-level framing (ALF) as well as the Light-Weight Session (LWS) protocol that was designed for large-scale conferencing applications. SRM includes some interesting features, such as localized retransmissions to avoid multicast spamming. However, I found some of the detailed discussion of simulation somewhat tedious. This was an interesting paper but not necessary essential to the syllabus.