From: Alan Cox <redacted>
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2012 14:12:22 +0100

In fact if you look up the stack you'll find a large number of multicast
messaging systems which do reliable transport built on top of IP. In fact
Red Hat provides a high level messaging cluster service that does exactly
this. (as well as dbus which does it on the deskop level) plus a ton of
stuff on top of that (JGroups etc)

Everybody at the application level has been using these 'receiver
reliable'  multicast services for years (Websphere MQ, TIBCO, RTPGM,
OpenPGM, MS-PGM, you name it). There are even accelerators for PGM based
protocols in things like Cisco routers and Solarflare can do much of it
on the card for 10Gbit.

The issue is that what to do when a receiver goes deaf is a policy
issue.