A Semi-reliable Multicast Protocol for Distributed Multimedia Applications in Large Scale Networks

This paper proposes a semi-reliable multicast protocol that aims to increase the quality of video streams transmitted in large-scale systems without overloading the video source and the communications network. This protocol, which is based on the IP multicast protocol and the MPEG standard, evaluates the necessity of retransmitting lost packets taking into account the capacity of the corresponding MPEG frames to improve the quality of the video stream. The proposed protocol relies on the neighboring receivers for retransmitting lost packets, resulting in much faster recovery, which is vital in order to receive retransmitted packets in time to be exhibited. Besides, this strategy avoids overloading the video source, making it more scalable than the traditional approach of retransmitting from the source.