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 plat- forms 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.