In order to deliver multicast traffic efficiently, multicast routing and reliable transmission mechanisms are required. The reliable delivery implies that lost packets must be retransmitted, which in turn requires that transmitted packets be stored in a retransmission buffer. Therefore how to manage a retransmission buffer is important and, in this paper, we try to solve the problem of how many packets should be maintained in the buffer. Our proposed scheme, the timer-based buffer management (TBM), maintains only necessary amount of buffer based on the timer value calculated from the NAKs between the replier and receivers on a multicast tree and can adjust to the dynamic network conditions. By performing simulations, we show that TBM manages the buffer efficiently regardless of the error situation, network size, and so on.