CacheCast: Eliminating Redundant Link Traffic for Single Source Multiple Destination Transfers

Due to the lack of multicast services in the Internet, applications based on single source multiple destinations transfers such as video conferencing, IP radio, IPTV must use unicast or application layer multicast. This in turn has several well-known drawbacks. A basic insight is that this type of traffic exhibits high redundancy with temporal clustering of duplicated packets. The redundancy originates from multiple transfers of the same data chunk over the same link. We propose CacheCast-a link layer caching mechanism-that eliminates the redundant data transmissions using small caches on links. CacheCast's underlying principles are simplicity and reliability. It is a fully distributed and incrementally deployable architecture. It consists of small caches on links that act independently. A single cache removes redundant data from a packet on the link entry and recovers the data on the link exit. Thus, link caches are transparent to routers. We show through analysis and simulation that CacheCast achieves near multicast efficiency for superposition of unicast connections. We implemented CacheCast in ns-2 and show that it does not violate the current understanding of "fairness" in the Internet.