Abstract

The application of FEC to multicast communication has seen a significant development in years. However, there are still numerous questions about practical implementations that make this field interesting for research. This work is an attempt to address some of these problems. In the first part of this investigation, the effect of different error control techniques to the multicast communication is analyzed. A new proactive hybrid FEC/ARQ technique is tested in the lab. This technique is based on the RSE code (Reed-Solomon Erasure Correcting Code) which mainly deals with erasures of network at packet level. The sender sends parity-encoded RSE repairs along with original data. The redundant information will allow the reconstruction of some amount of missing data at the receivers. If these proactive repairs are insufficient to reliably deliver the data to receivers, additional RSE repairs are obtained via receiver requests for the transmission (ARQ) of additional repairs. The thesis also proposes a reliable multicast implementation scheme, and develops a laboratory test-bed for this scheme. Multicast tree is built and maintained by adopting some control messages for multicast session establishment. According to dynamically established multicast routing table, data packets will be propagated from senders to receivers through Rendezvous Points. The above-mentioned proactive hybrid FEC/ARQ technique is applied to this scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared to that of the traditional ARQ scheme. Significant improvements are achieved in terms of transmission time, feedback implosion, and bandwidth utilization.