Introducing Air Caching Techniques for Boosting Reliable Multicasting for Satellite Networks

The emergence of satellite networks and the demand for reliability in transferring large files over the network via satellites has created the need for building effective reliable multicasting protocols, customized for this kind of networks. During the previous years, several protocols and techniques have been proposed to address the demanding problem of reliability in multicasting protocols. In our study we are trying to give a different perspective to the work that already has been done, with the use of Air Caching. The combined use of this technique along with the use of forward error correction (FEC) can boost substantially the performance of reliable protocols in terms of transmission rounds, by paying a small overhead in bandwidth usage. We present three protocols, the UDPAC (Unchanged Data Packets in Air Cache), the RDPAC (Replace Data Packets in Air Cache) and the PPAC (Parity Packets inAir Cache). The performance of these three protocols, in terms of Transmission Rounds and robustness in erroneous environments, is compared with two already known protocols, which are based on the simple ARQ and the FEC, respectively.