The cost of active services in active reliable multicast

Associating customized processing to incoming packets, active networking provides a general framework for new protocol deployment and new service implementations. Recently, the use of these active network concepts has been proposed in many research areas including multicast protocols where efficient mechanisms for the reliability problems can be proposed. However these active services introduce additional processing costs that must be carefully evaluated. This paper presents the preliminary results in measuring, in the context of the DyRAM protocol, the raw processing time required for enabling low-latency multicast communications on the Internet.