Reliable Multicast Clouds

Multicast group communications are essential for armed forces to effectively coordinate and execute missions in live theater, and given all the dynamics that a network can be subjected to in mission-critical situations (i.e., any combination of fast fading, slow fading, frequency jamming, network congestion, mobility), ensuring an appropriate level of network fidelity for supporting reliable communications becomes a difficult wireless networking problem. We argue for designing tunable reliability more explicitly into the act of topology construction based on the severity of forecasted dynamics in the network. This paper studies the number of nodes in the network supporting multicast traffic for a group of nodes; with more nodes supporting multicast traffic, the number of available redundant paths increases, enhancing reliability. We investigate the fundamental tradeoff of the amount of nodes supporting multicast communication