Why Use a Fishing Line When You Have a Net?
An Adaptive Multicast Data Distribution Protocol
Jeremy R. Cooperstock and Steve Kotsopoulos
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Toronto
Abstract
The design and implementation of a system to provide reliable and
efficient distribution of large quantities of data to many hosts on a
local area network or internetwork is described. By exploiting the
one-to-many transmission capabilities of multicast and broadcast, it
is possible to transmit data to multiple hosts simultaneously, using
less bandwidth and thus obtaining greater efficiency than repeated
unicasting. Although performance measurements indicate the
superiority of multicast, we dynamically select from available
transmission modes so as to maximize efficiency and throughput while
providing reliable delivery of data to all hosts. Our results
demonstrate that file-distribution programs based on our protocol can
benefit from a substantial speed-up over TCP-based programs such as
rdist. For example, our system has been used to distribute a 133
Kbyte password file to 68 hosts in 20 seconds, whereas the equivalent
rdist took 251 seconds.
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