Reliable multicast with active filtering for distributed simulations

Large, distributed simulations where multicast is used for data, distribution has an inherent scalability problem-the number of multicast groups grows rapidly with the number of participants. We describe a publish/subscribe based active networking system where receiver interest information is stored as packet filters at the active nodes on the multicast distribution tree and multicast data is pruned at the earliest node possible. Modifications to the system provide reliable data delivery to support loss-sensitive data stream. Selective caching at some active nodes allows the recipient of a lossy data stream to partially trace back to the first cached instance of the missing packet. We argue that the performance penalty for applications that do not use the active filtering service is minimal, enabling the system to coexist in an open network with other applications.