Applied Reliable Multicast Using the Xpress Transport Protocol (XTP)

Reliable multicast protocols provide a means to deliver data from one sender to many receivers with assurance. Reliable multicast is better suited than unicast for the bandwidth restricted, high error rate, hostile communications environment found in the military's tactical arena. General purpose protocols ensure adaptability to the variety of communications suites currently used by the military. As well, any acceptable multicast protocol must support varying levels of assurance, from unreliable delivery to full reliability. This thesis evaluates the performance capabilities of one implementation of the Xpress Transport Protocol SandiaXTP, which is a reliable multicast transport protocol. Four experiments are run on a testbed consisting of four Sun SPARC4 workstations. These experiments look at unicast and multicast transmissions with varying numbers of induced efforts. The included performance measurements examine the various challenges present in a communications medium subject to attack. The results demonstrate that reliable multicast in a tactical environment is possible.