A game-theoretic approach to network embedded FEC over large-scale networks

An efficient multicast communication is crucial for many parallel high-performance scientific (e.g., genomic) applications involving a large number of computing machines, a considerable amount of data to be processed and a wide set of users providing inputs and/or interested in the results. Most of these applications are also characterized by strong requirements for the reliability and timely data sharing since involved in providing decision support for critical activities, such as genomic medicine. In the current literature, reliable multicast is always achieved at the expenses of violations of temporal constraints, since retransmissions are used to recover lost messages. In this paper, we present a solution to apply a proper coding scheme so as to jointly achieved reliability and timeliness when multicasting over the Internet. Such a solution employs game theory so as to select the best locations within the multicast tree where to perform coding operations.We prove the quality of this solution by using a series of simulations run on OMNET++.