Protocol design for large group multicasting: the message distribution protocol

Abstract Typical multicast protocols are designed to operate with group sizes of up to 50 members. Many of the techniques used do not scale to larger groups very well due to the implosion problem. This paper describes a protocol which has been designed to be scalable to a large degree. The protocol uses negative acknowledgements to increase its reliability, with a saturation method being used when the message is small. This ensures that a message has a high probability of being detected, regardless of the message size. The use of negative acknowledgements is intended to reduce the implosion effect to a minimum. A logical tokenbased ring system is used at the transport level to prevent all of the recipients of a multicast replying at the same time, preventing the client being overrun. Also, this token is used as a failure detector, causing the ring structure to reconfigure around the failure.

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