Issues in providing a reliable multicast facility

Issues involved in point-to-multipoint communication are presented and the literature for proposed solutions and approaches surveyed. Particular attention is focused on the ideas and implementations that align with the requirements of the environment of interest. The attributes of multicast receiver groups that might lead to useful classifications, what the functionality of a management scheme should be, and how the group management module can be implemented are examined. The services that multicasting facilities can offer are presented, followed by mechanisms within the communications protocol that implements these services. The metrics of interest when evaluating a reliable multicast facility are identified and applied to four transport layer protocols that incorporate reliable multicast

Study of architecture and protocols for reliable multicasting in packet switching networks

Group multicast protocols have been challenged to provide scalable solutions that meet the following requirements: (i) reliable delivery from different sources to all destinations within a multicast group; (ii) congestion control among multiple asynchronous sources. Although it is mainly a transport layer task, reliable group multicasting depends on routing architectures as well. This dissertation covers issues of both network and transport layers. Two routing architectures, tree and ring, are surveyed with a comparative study of their routing costs and impact to upper layer performances. Correspondingly, two generic transport protocol models are established for performance study. The tree-based protocol is rate-based and uses negative acknowledgment mechanisms for reliability control, while the ring-based protocol uses window-based flow control and positive acknowledgment schemes. The major performance measures observed in the study are network cost, multicast delay, throughput and efficiency. The results suggest that the tree architecture costs less at network layer than the ring, and helps to minimize latency under light network load. Meanwhile, heavy load reliable group multicasting can benefit from ring architecture, which facilitates window-based flow and congestion control. Based on the comparative study, a new two-hierarchy hybrid architecture, Rings Interconnected with Tree Architecture (RITA), is presented. Here, a multicast group is partitioned into multiple clusters with the ring as the intra-cluster architecture, and the tree as backbone architecture that implements inter-cluster multicasting. To compromise between performance measures such as delay and through put, reliability and congestion controls are accomplished at the transport layer with a hybrid use of rate and window-based protocols, which are based on either negative or positive feedback mechanisms respectively. Performances are compared with simulations against tree- and ring-based approaches. Results are encouraging because RITA achieves similar throughput performance as the ring-based protocol, but with significantly lowered delay. Finally, the multicast tree packing problem is discussed. In a network accommodating multiple concurrent multicast sessions, routing for an individual session can be optimized to minimize the competition with other sessions, rather than to minimize cost or delay. Packing lower bound and a heuristic are investigated. Simulation show that congestion can be reduced effectively with limited cost increase of routings

Effective interprocess communication (IPC) in a real-time transputer network

The thesis describes the design and implementation of an interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism within a real-time distributed operating system kernel (RT-DOS) which is designed for a transputer-based network. The requirements of real-time operating systems are examined and existing design and implementation strategies are described. Particular attention is paid to one of the object-oriented techniques although it is concluded that these techniques are not feasible for the chosen implementation platform. Studies of a number of existing operating systems are reported. The choices for various aspects of operating system design and their influence on the IPC mechanism to be used are elucidated. The actual design choices are related to the real-time requirements and the implementation that has been adopted is described. [Continues.

Reliable multicast transport by satellite: a hybrid satellite/terrestrial solution with erasure codes

Geostationary satellites are an efficient way to provide a large scale multipoint communication service. In the context of reliable multicast communications, a new hybrid satellite/terrestrial approach is proposed. It aims at reducing the overall communication cost using satellite broadcasting only when enough receivers are present, and terrestrial transmissions otherwise. This approach has been statistically evaluated for a particular cost function and seems interesting. Then since the hybrid approach relies on Forward Error Correction, several practical aspects of MDS codes and LDPC codes are investigated in order to select a code

A Generic Communications Module for Cooperative 3D Visualization and Modelling over the Internet: the Collaborative API

Cooperative three-dimensional visualization and modeling applications allow a distributed group of users to work together with a model they share. To implement this kind of applications the underlying communications system must provide reliable and ordered multicast of users interactions. Due to the high complexity that characterizes the models, network bandwidth requirements have limited their use to intranets or in a few cases to very high-speed Internet connections. In this paper we present a communications module that solves this problem. The library exposed, which is called Collaborative API, supports the creation of very efficient cooperative 3D visualization and modeling applications by optimizing the use of the network resources. The Collaborative API, implements a new communications architecture: the dynamic client/server. The communications module presented in this paper is illustrated by two examples of applications that use it to provide cooperative 3D visualization over the Internet