University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Jinsuk Baek
will defend his dissertation proposal

Scalable Approaches for Tree-Based Reliable Multicast

Abstract

Tree-based reliable multicast protocols provide scalability by distributing error-recovery tasks among several repair nodes. These repair nodes integrate the status information of their receiver nodes and perform local error recovery for these nodes using the data stored in their buffers. However, there are still two open issues in tree-based protocols. The first is how to construct a logical tree in an efficient manner. We propose an efficient hybrid scheme for constructing a well-organized logical tree with reasonable message and time overhead.

The second open issue is when to discard packets from the buffers of repair nodes. Discarding packets that might still be needed is unacceptable, because it would force the receiver nodes to contact the sender node whenever one of them needs a retransmission of a discarded packet. Schemes addressing this issue can be broadly divided into ACK-based and NAK-based schemes. However, both approaches suffer from their own limitations. We present several new buffer management schemes and define a prototype of our new scheme. These schemes provide acceptable compromise between ACK-based and NAK-based scheme in terms of the number of feedbacks from receiver nodes and error recovery delay.

Date: Friday, December 5, 2003
Time: 4:00 PM
Place: 550-PGH

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Jehan-François Pâris