Adding Congestion Control to the Selectively Reliable Transmission Protocol for Large-Scale Distributed Simulation,” 97F-SIW-018, Simulation Interoperability Workshop

HLA, multicast, selectively reliable transmission, congestion control ABSTRACT: We have developed a protocol to provide reliable transmission for the critical fraction of compressed DIS transmissions that provide reference data, by taking advantage of the stream of best-effort transmissions that provide transient data. This approach also has significant promise as a way to provide interoperable, re-usable components for the HLA RTI to be used for distributed virtual simulation.. In this paper we address issues of reliable multicast, with emphasis on the critical requirement for congestion control due to the fact that in a multicast network the large amount of control traffic arising from reliable transmission can overwhelm the data traffic in an “ACK implosion”. We review the most promising techniques for congestion control currently used in reliable multicast research, and in particular a highly promising technique we call hop-hierarchical multicast logging that can greatly reduce control traffic while also providing very responsive repairs for lost reference data messages. 1