Using Multicast FEC to Solve the Midnight Madness Problem

“Push” technologies to large receiver sets often do not scale due to large amounts of data replication and limited network bandwidth. Even with improvements from multicast communication, scaling challenges persist. Diverse receiver capabilities still result in a high degree of resends. To combat this drawback, we combine multicast with Forward Error Correction. In this paper we describe an implementation of this approach that we call filecasting (Fcast) because of its direct application to multicast bulk data transfers. We discuss a variety of uses for such an application, focusing on solving the Midnight Madness problem, where congestion occurs at Web sites when a popular new resource is made available.

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