Overcast: reliable multicasting with on overlay network

Overcast is an application-level multicasting system that can be incrementally deployed using today's Internet infrastructure. These properties stem from Overcast's implementation as an overlay network. An overlay network consists of a collection of nodes placed at strategic locations in an existing network fabric. These nodes implement a network abstraction on top of the network provided by the underlying substrate network. Overcast provides scalable and reliable single-source multicast using a simple protocol for building efficient data distribution trees that adapt to changing network conditions. To support fast joins, Overcast implements a new protocol for efficiently tracking the global status of a changing distribution tree. Results based on simulations confirm that Overcast provides its added functionality while performing competitively with IP Multicast. Simulations indicate that Overcast quickly builds bandwidth-efficient distribution trees that, compared to IP Multicast, provide 70%-100% of the total bandwidth possible, at a cost of somewhat less than twice the network load. In addition, Overcast adapts quickly to changes caused by the addition of new nodes or the failure of existing nodes without causing undue load on the multicast source.

[1]  Michael Burrows,et al.  Autonet: A High-Speed, Self-Configuring Local Area Network Using Point-to-Point Links , 1991, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[2]  Stephen Deering,et al.  Multicast routing in a datagram internetwork , 1992 .

[3]  Matthew Addison Blaze Caching in large-scale distributed file systems , 1993 .

[4]  Ralph E. Droms,et al.  Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol , 1993, RFC.

[5]  Richard S. Hall,et al.  A case for caching file objects inside internetworks , 1993, SIGCOMM '93.

[6]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  FLIP: an internetwork protocol for supporting distributed systems , 1993, TOCS.

[7]  Margo I. Seltzer,et al.  The case for geographical push-caching , 1995, Proceedings 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-V).

[8]  Peter Sturm,et al.  Introducing Application-Level Replication and Naming into Today's Web , 1996, Comput. Networks.

[9]  Peter B. Danzig,et al.  A Hierarchical Internet Object Cache , 1996, USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

[10]  Ellen W. Zegura,et al.  How to model an internetwork , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '96. Conference on Computer Communications.

[11]  Azer Bestavros Speculative data dissemination and service to reduce server load, network traffic and service time in distributed information systems , 1996, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Data Engineering.

[12]  David R. Karger,et al.  Consistent hashing and random trees: distributed caching protocols for relieving hot spots on the World Wide Web , 1997, STOC '97.

[13]  G.J. Minden,et al.  A survey of active network research , 1997, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[14]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Parity-based loss recovery for reliable multicast transmission , 1997, TNET.

[15]  Steven McCanne,et al.  An active service framework and its application to real-time multimedia transcoding , 1998, SIGCOMM '98.

[16]  Van Jacobson,et al.  Adaptive web caching: towards a new global caching architecture , 1998, Comput. Networks.

[17]  Yair Amir,et al.  Seamlessly Selecting the Best Copy from Internet-Wide Replicated Web Servers , 1998, DISC.

[18]  Amin Vahdat,et al.  Detour: informed Internet routing and transport , 1999, IEEE Micro.

[19]  David R. Cheriton,et al.  IP multicast channels: EXPRESS support for large-scale single-source applications , 1999, SIGCOMM '99.

[20]  Steven McCanne,et al.  RMX: reliable multicast for heterogeneous networks , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[21]  Matthew Green,et al.  PRISM, an IP-based architecture for broadband access to TV and other streaming media , 2000 .

[22]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  A case for end system multicast , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..