---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 13:59:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sylvia Ratnasamy <sylviar@CS.Berkeley.EDU>
To: mash-meeting@mash.cs.berkeley.edu
Subject: 10/25 MASH meeting.
I'll be doing a practice run for my upcoming ICNP talk :
"Scaling End-to-end Multicast Transports with a
Topologically-sensitive Group Formation Protocol "
The paper is at
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sylviar/gfp.ps
Abstract
The IP service model retains its simplicity and robustness
by deferring reliability and congestion control to higher
layers through end-to-end transport protocols.
While the IP unicast service has proven successful, extending
end-to-end adaptation to multicast has been a difficult problem.
Unlike the unicast case, multicast protocols must support large
and heterogeneous receiver sets. While proposed approaches to
multicast transports attempt to localize problems and/or
organize receivers into a hierarchy through a divide-and-conquer
approach, this approach succeeds only if the resulting
hierarchy is congruent with the underlying routing tree topology.
This implies the need for some level of topological information
at the end systems which the IP multicast service
deliberately hides.
In this paper, we explore the problem of inferring the required
topological information using only observations made at the end hosts.
To this end, we present a Group Formation Protocol (GFP)
whereby receivers dynamically organize
themselves into a multi-level hierarchy of multicast groups that
corresponds to the underlying routing tree. GFP
can serve as a core component across a wide range of multicast
applications and protocols such as local recovery for reliable multicast,
self organized transcoding, self organizing web caches,
the optimal and dynamic placement of proxies, repeaters, designated receivers,
recorders and so forth. Our simulations indicate that GFP structures
receivers in accordance with the underlying topology for a range of
workloads and network topologies.