A multicast transport protocol
- 1 August 1988
- proceedings article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Vol. 18 (4), 247-256
- https://doi.org/10.1145/52324.52349
Abstract
This paper presents the design of a reliable multicast transport protocol. The aim of the protocol is to provide a service equivalent to a sequence of reliable sequential unicasts between a client and a number of servers, whilst using the broadcast nature of some networks to reduce both the number of packets transmitted and the overall time needed to collect replies.The service interface of the protocol offers several types of service, ranging from the collection of a single reply from any one of a set of servers to the collection of all replies from all known servers. The messages may be of effectively arbitrary size, and the number of servers may be quite large. To support this service over real networks, special flow control mechanisms are used to avoid multiple replies overrunning the client. Reliable delivery is ensured using timeouts and a distributed acknowledgement scheme. The protocol is implemented over a network layer which support multicast destination addressing and packet delivery. The behaviour of the protocol over both LANs and LANs interconnected by WAN lines is discussed. We also include some notions for possible future support from network interface hardware.Keywords
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