The implementation and evaluation of reliable IP multicast

This research investigates multicast communications on both local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). Developing and evaluating reliable protocols for multicast communication is the focus of the study. Today, most multicast applications rely only on best effort delivery. This research measures the performance of reliable Internet Protocol (IP) multicast protocols and develops analytical models.

This research further evaluates reliable IP multicast by implementing the protocol in the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). Currently, PVM's pvm_mcast() uses looping and unicast messages to send one message to many hosts. On a LAN, broadcast has been examined as perhaps a more efficient method in sending a multi-destination PVM mes- sage. IP multicast permits a single message to reach multiple hosts on both the LAN or the WAN. The IP multicast protocol which was developed for this study is implemented reliably to satisfy PVM's design criteria. The design and performance of the IP multicast version is compared with PVM's present multiple unicast implementation.