Improving scalability on reliable multicast communications

This paper derives throughput and delay expressions for multicopy-based transmission on reliable multicast communications. The multicopy scheme consists of transmitting a fixed number of packet copies in order to increase the successful reception probability of packets and, consequently, decrease the required number of acknowledgements. For a large number of receivers, the results show a low mean delay and a high throughput. The multicopy strategy also presents a good performance under high error rates and heavy traffic load conditions.