Proposal of a reliable multicast protocol in a HAP-satellite architecture

Terrestrial and satellite networks have dominated the telecommunications arena for years. In parallel with these two well-established technologies, a new alternative based on platforms located in the stratosphere, termed High Altitude Platforms (HAP's), has gained considerable interest in the past few years. In this paper, we consider an integrated HAP-satellite architecture and propose a reliable multicast protocol that capitalizes upon the HAP-layer to perform local retransmissions. Our protocol relies on a progressive packet-level Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme. The performance of this multicast protocol has been supported thorough the comparison with a theoretical bound in the literature.