A Reliable Multicast Framework for Applications

Our work involves developing a reliable multicast framework that can scale well to both very large networks and very large sessions. The scalability and the efficiency of the framework is estimated by using it as the backbone of ‘WhiteBoard’, a distributed teleseminaring tool which maintains a shared window supporting graphics and text. In order to avoid the associated overhead, the framework does not guarantee that packets will be delivered in any particular order. Through ‘WhiteBoard’, we show how applications can easily extend the framework to enforce any particular order which they might need to satisfy their quality of service requirements.