Improving the Efficiency of a Multicast File Transfer Tool based on ALC
Abstract
This work describes several techniques that we used to design a multicast file transfer tool on top of ALC, the Asynchronous Layered Coding protocol proposed by the RMT IETF working group. More specifically we analyze several object and symbol ordering schemes that improve transmission efficiency and we see how the Application Level Framing (ALF) paradigm can help to reduce memory requirements and enable processing to be hidden behind communica- tions. Because of its popularity and availability we use a Reed-Solomon FEC code, yet most of our results can be applied to other FEC codes. A strength of this work resides in the fact that all the techniques introduced have actually been implemented and their benefits quantified.