Router buffering and caching techniques for multi-session reliable multicast

Reliable multicast has been studied extensively during the past 10 years. Recently, several reliable multicast schemes employing router assistance have been proposed, which not only promise performance gains, but also simplify applications. But the existing schemes based on router assistance didn't consider either simultaneous multiple sessions in network, or the problem of how to share the forwarding buffer of router outgoing port and partition the router cache for multiple multicast sessions so that a better performance of reliable multicast can be achieved. Our work is an attempt to address some of these problems. In this thesis, we consider a multi-session multicast network and the data caching technique at router for loss recovery. Several policies of router forwarding buffer allocation and router cache partition are introduced for use in the multi-session multicast network. The effect of these policies on the performance of reliable multicast is tested, compared and analyzed. Additionally, the performance of the ARQ scheme with caching is compared with that of the ARQ scheme without caching. Simulation results show that for the scheme with router caching technique, significant improvements are achieved in terms of end-to-end delay, session transmission time, feedback traffic, and bandwidth utilization