OPTIMAL DETERMINISTIC TIMEOUTS FOR RELIABLE SCALABLE MULTICAST

Reliable multicast protocols suffer from the problem of feedback implo sion, To avoid this problem, the number of receivers sending feedback in case of loss must be small, However, losses experienced by differen t receivers are strongly correlated, since receivers share common reso urces in the multicast tree. One approach to feedback implosion avoida nce relies on delaying feedback at the receivers, We present determini stic timeouts for reliable multicast (DTRM), a distributed algorithm t o compute optimal deterministic timeouts for each receiver in a multic ast tree as a function of the tree topology and the sender-to-receiver round-trip delays, DTRM has several desirable properties, First, feed back implosion is provably avoided for a single loss anywhere in the t ree, provided delay jitter is bounded, Second, the computation of the timeouts can be entirely distributed; receivers and intermediate nodes only rely on local topology information, Third, the timeouts computed by DTRM are optimal with respect to the maximum response time.