Reliable multicast transport protocols support dissemination communication and their throughputs
are either limited by the sender or by intermediate nodes that consolidate acknowledgements
and retransmissions. RMSP is a portable reliable multicast protocol that supports collaborative
communication at the session-layer level and provides higher throughput by maintaining two transport
connections per node irrespective of the number of nodes. However, the throughput only of
RMSP may degrade if one or more nodes or the centralized connection manager that monitors
them fails. In this report, we propose a fully distributed fault-tolerant protocol, DFT-RMSP, that
detects and isolates faulty nodes and reinstates the multicast collaborative communications. We
derive analytic expressions for throughput degradation and analyze its sensitivity to node-failure
rates, network delay, and multicast group size. We show that DFT-RMSP provides less downtime
and achieves graceful throughput degradation under high failure rates compared with RMSP.
simultaneous node failures.