A hierarchical ack-based protocol for reliable multicast in mobile networks

This paper presents the protocol for reliable multicast communication in mobile networks. Current research for these protocols generally uses an ack-based approach and consists of mobile support stations and supervisor hosts. Each supervisor host controls a group of neighboring mobile support stations by delivering one ack message to the sender and collecting ack messages from all the mobile hosts that are joined in a multicast group and are in its domain. But if either the number of mobile hosts in the supervisor host’s domain is increased or the mobile hosts crowd around a particular supervisor host, an ack implosion of the supervisor host can occur because of the number of ack messages from mobile hosts. To solve the problem, we propose the HARM approach, a reliable multicast protocol that hierarchically processes ack messages in both the mobile support station and the supervisor host to alleviate the ack messages.