Caching policy design and cache allocation in active reliable multicast

Abstract

Active reliable multicast (ARM) is a novel loss recovery scheme for large-scale reliable multicast. It uses active routers to perform NACK (negative-acknowledgement) consolidation and scoped retransmission. For optimizing the loss recovery performance of ARM under limited cache resources, the work in this paper aims at designing efficient and robust cache allocation schemes and caching policies. When a packet arrives at an active router, a caching policy determines if this packet should be cached and if cached, for how long. Three caching policies, timer-based, simple FIFO and probabilistic FIFO, are investigated in this paper. For a given amount of cache, the cache allocation problem is to find the best way to allocate the cache to each active router such that the overall network loss recovery performance can be optimized. Three cache allocation schemes, equal sharing, least requirement first and proportional allocation, are proposed. Among all the combinations of cache allocations and caching policies, we found that the proportional cache allocation with probabilistic FIFO caching policy gives the best overall performance. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.