Configuration of ACK trees for multicast transport protocols

For scalable multicast transport, one of the promising approaches is to employ a control tree known as acknowledgement (ACK) tree which can be used to convey information on reliability and session status from receivers to a root sender. The existing tree configuration has focused on a 'bottom-up' scheme in which ACK trees grow from leaf receivers toward a root sender. This paper proposes an alternative 'top-down' configuration where an ACK tree begins at the root sender and gradually expands by including non-tree nodes into the tree in a stepwise manner. The proposed scheme is simple and practical to implement along with multicast transport protocols. It is also employed as a tree configuration in the Enhanced Communications Transport Protocol, which has been standardized in the ITU-T and ISO/IEC JTC1. From experimental simulations, we see that the top-down scheme provides advantages over the existing bottom-up one in terms of the number of control messages required for tree configuration and the number of tree levels.