Reliable Multicast has been applied to large-scale contents delivery systems for distributing digital contents to a large number of users without data loss. Reliable contents distribution is indispensable for software updates and management data sharing in actual delivery services. This paper evaluates the implementation and performance of RMTP; a reliable multicast protocol for bulk-data transfer, through the developments of contents delivery systems. Software configuration is also examined including operation functions such as delivery scheduling. Furthermore, applicability of reliable multicast to emerging broadband networks is also discussed based on the experimentation results. Through the deployment of the protocol and the software, performance estimation has played a key role for constructing the delivery systems as well as for designing the communication protocol.

This paper evaluates the performance of a reliable multicast protocol for bulk-data transfer over unreliable networks via IP-multicast. Bulk-data type reliable multicast appears promising for commercial publishing and large-scale data replication. The proposed reliable multicast transport protocol (RMTP) provides high-performance due to the use of IP multicast while also providing confirmed and error free transfer by end-to-end controls. The protocol includes a multi-round selective repeat scheme dedicated for bulk-data multicast applications. This paper examines the multicast retransmission procedures in RMTP through analysis and tests on an implemented system and clarifies the basic performance behavior of the protocol. Evaluations are conducted with regard to retransmission redundancy, transfer time, and packet processing load with various error conditions and number of receivers. Against the response concentration problem seen in end-to-end communication, the backoff time algorithm is applied to the protocol; the limits it places on system scalability are clarified.