A case for end system multicast

— The conventional wisdom has been that IP is the natural protocol layer for implementing multicast related functionality. However, more than a decade after its initial proposal, IP Multicast is still plagued with concerns pertaining to scalability, network management, deployment and support for higher layer functionality such as error, flow and congestion control. In this paper, we explore an alternative architecture that we term End System Multicast, where end systems implement all multicast related functionality including membership management and packet replication. This shifting of multicast support from routers to end systems has the potential to address most problems associated with IP Multicast. However, the key concern is the performance penalty associated with such a model. In particular, End System Multicast introduces duplicate packets on physical links and incurs larger end-to-end delays than IP Multicast. In this paper, we study these performance concerns in the contex...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Yang-Hua Chu, Sanjay G. Rao, Hui Zhang
• Keywords: End Systems, Hardware, IP Multicast, Multicast, SIGMETRICS 2000