IRMA: a reliable multicast architecture for the Internet

The Illinois Reliable Multicast Architecture (IRMA) is a reliable multicast architecture that guarantees reliable, sequenced, and loosely synchronized delivery of multicast streams. IRMA provides ACK-based reliability, hybrid local server-initiated and sender-initiated loss recovery, and support for end-to-end flow control and congestion control. Unlike most contemporary work, IRMA supports TCP as the reliable multicast transport protocol at the end host without modifications. IRMA has been instantiated in a laboratory testbed, and its performance has been measured in various scenarios. Preliminary performance results show that IRMA is efficient and adaptive to the dynamics of the network.