Scalable and Robust Reliable Multicast for Satellite Networks

The evolution of satellite applications has created new traffic patterns on satellite links. That is because the number of users demanding service from satellite links has increased tremendously. The result is a more sophisticated use of resources. One way of accomplishing that is by multicasting, which is a natural extension of the broadcast nature of the satellite medium. Numerous existing satellite applications demand reliable delivery of the transmitted data, which is opposed to the unreliable nature of multicast transmission due to the error prone satellite medium. We have designed a number of reliable multicasting protocols which are based on forward error correction (FEC) and air caching. The combination of those two techniques results in a significant boost in the performance of reliable multicasting protocols.