Cooperative Loss Recovery for Reliable Multicast in Ad Hoc Networks

Providing reliable multicast service is very challenging in Ad Hoc networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient loss recovery scheme for reliable multicast (CoreRM). Our basic idea is to apply the notion of cooperative communications to support local loss recovery in multicast. A receiver node experiencing a packet loss tries to recover the lost packet through progressively cooperating with neighboring nodes, upstream nodes or even source node. In order to reduce recovery latency and retransmission overhead, CoreRM caches not only data packets but also the path which could be used for future possible use to expedite the loss recovery process. Both analytical and simulation results reveal that CoreRM significantly improves the reliable multicast performance in terms of delivery ratio, throughput and recovery latency compared with UDP and PGM.