We study the behavior of an application, WebCanal, that implemented a reliable multicast protocol, the Lightweight Reliable Multicast Protocol, LRMP. LRMP was designed for multicasting of WWW documents in a reliable, ordered, scalable fashion. We wrote a simulator and ran around ninety simulations, varying a number of parameters, like group size and loss severities. Our experiments show that the
... [Show full abstract] number of control packets LRMP generates scales up with the group size under a variety of network conditions. The selective NACKs of the LRMP protocol do significantly reduce traffic, especially under high loss conditions. We postulate that local recovery would reduce the degree to which LRMP control traffic increases with increasing group size. 1 INTRODUCTION The ever-growing popularity of the World-Wide Web has lead to a proliferation of popular new application types. Among these, closely coupled to the Internet multicast capabilities [4] and the growth of "pushed" data (as opposed to the t...