Building a network embedded FEC protocol by using game theory

Abstract Due to their decoupling and scalability properties, multicast technologies are widely adopted in all the software projects aiming at integrating off-the-shelf systems, in order to compose large-scale complex infrastructures. This also holds within the context of mission critical systems, where strong requirements for reliable and timely data sharing are imposed. In the current literature, reliable multicast is always achieved at the expenses of violations of the temporal constraints, since retransmissions are used to recover lost messages. When timeliness requirements assume the same importance as the reliability ones, the techniques based on spatial redundancy, such as forward error correction, are preferable. However, such coding techniques are scarcely adopted within multicast services due to the difficulties related to the optimal tuning of the introduced redundancy. In this paper, we present a solution applying a proper coding scheme that jointly achieves reliability and timeliness in all those scenarios involving tree-based multicasting over the Internet. Such a solution employs game theory in order to select the best locations within the multicast tree where coding operations have to be performed. We prove the quality of this solution by using a series of simulations running on OMNET++, that compare the achievable quality with respect to the optimal solution of the underlying optimization problem.