Abstract
Although IP multicast is an effective network primitive for
best-effort, large-scale, multi-point communication, many multicast
applications such as shared whiteboards, multi-player games and software
distribution require reliable data delivery. Building services like
reliable sequenced delivery on top of IP multicast has proven to be a
hard problem. The enormous extent of network and end-system
heterogeneity in multipoint communication exacerbates the design of
scalable end-to-end reliable multicast protocols. In this paper, we
propose a radical departure from the traditional end-to-end model for
reliable multicast and instead propose a hybrid approach that leverages
the successes of unicast reliability protocols such as TCP while
retaining the efficiency of IP multicast for multi-point data delivery.
Our approach splits a large heterogeneous reliable multicast session
into a number of multicast data groups of co-located homogeneous
participants. A collection of application-aware agents-reliable
multicast proxies (RMX)-organizes these data groups into a spanning tree
using an overlay network of TCP connections. Sources transmit data to
their local group, and the RMX in that group forwards the data towards
the rest of the data groups. RMX use detailed knowledge of application
semantics to adapt to the effects of heterogeneity in the environment.
To demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture, we have built a
prototype implementation that can be customized for different kinds of
applications
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