An analysis of the main factors on the performance of reliable multicast

In the research on reliable multicast, it is regarded as a successful approach to organize all the participators into a hierarchical structure to improve the performance of reliable multicast. The hierarchical structure may suppress the propagation of both feedback and recovery packets. Besides, the capability of local recovery is improved when a whole group is divided into several subgroups. Considering that we must know the main factors affecting the performance of reliable multicast before constructing the hierarchical structure, we study these factors to provide a foundation for hierarchical reliable multicast protocols to build their grouping criterions. The results of numerical experiments are also given to illuminate how these factors influence the performance of reliable multicast.