skip to main content
article
Free access

Bimodal multicast

Published: 01 May 1999 Publication History

Abstract

There are many methods for making a multicast protocol “reliable.” At one end of the spectrum, a reliable multicast protocol might offer tomicity guarantees, such as all-or-nothing delivery, delivery ordering, and perhaps additional properties such as virtually synchronous addressing. At the other are protocols that use local repair to overcome transient packet loss in the network, offering “best effort” reliability. Yet none of this prior work has treated stability of multicast delivery as a basic reliability property, such as might be needed in an internet radio, television, or conferencing application. This article looks at reliability with a new goal: development of a multicast protocol which is reliable in a sense that can be rigorously quantified and includes throughput stability guarantees. We characterize this new protocol as a “bimodal multicast” in reference to its reliability model, which corresponds to a family of bimodal probability distributions. Here, we introduce the protocol, provide a theoretical analysis of its behavior, review experimental results, and discuss some candidate applications. These confirm that bimodal multicast is reliable, scalable, and that the protocol provides remarkably stable delivery throughput.

References

[1]
BAILEY, N. 1975. The Mathematical Theory of Infectious Diseases. 2nd edition Charles Griffen and Company, London, England, United Kingdom.]]
[2]
BAJAJ, S., BRESLAU, L., ESTRIN, D., FALL, K., FLOYD, S., HALDAR, P., HANDLEY, M., HELMY, A., HEIDEMANN, J., HUANG, P., KUMAR, S., MCCANNE, S., REJAIE, R., SHARMA, P., VARADHAN, K., Xu, Y., Yu, H., AND ZAPPALA, D. 1999. Improving simulation for network research. Tech. Rep. 99-702. Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.]]
[3]
BALDONI, R., MOSTEFAOUI, A., AND RAYNAL, M. 1996a. Casual delivery of messages with real-time data in unreliable networks. Real-Time Syst. 10, 3, 245-262.]]
[4]
BALDONI, R., PRAKASH, R., RAYNAL, M., AND SINGHAL, M. 1996b. Broadcast with time and causality constraints for multimedia applications. INRIA, Rennes, France.]]
[5]
BIRMAN, K. 1994. A response to Cheriton and Skeen's criticism of causal and totally ordered communication. ACM SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 28, 1 (Jan. 1994), 11-21.]]
[6]
BIRMAN, K. P. 1997. Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications. Manning Publications Co., Greenwich, CT. http://www.browsebooks.com/Birman/index.html.]]
[7]
BIRMAN, K. P. 1999. A review of experiences with reliable multicast. Softw. Pract. Exper. 29, 9.]]
[8]
BIRMAN, K., FRIEDMAN, R., HAYDEN, M., AND RHEE, I. 1998. Middleware support for distributed multimedia and collaborative computing. In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia and Networking (MMCN '98, San Jose, CA). ACM, New York, NY.]]
[9]
CHERITON, D. R. AND SKEEN, D. 1993. Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication. ACM SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 27, 5 (Dec. 1993), 44-57.]]
[10]
COOPER, R. 1994. Experience with causally and totally ordered communication support: A cautionary tale. ACM SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 28, 1 (Jan. 1994), 28-31.]]
[11]
CRISTIAN, F., AGHILI, H., STRONG, R., AND DOLEV, D. 1985. Atomic broadcast: From simple message diffusion to Byzantine agreement. In Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS '85, Ann Arbor, MI, June). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 200-206.]]
[12]
CRISTIAN, F., DOLEV, D., STRONG, R., AND AGHILI, H. 1990. Atomic broadcast in a real-time environment. In Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing, B. Simons and A. Spector, Eds. Springer lecutre notes in computer science. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 51-71.]]
[13]
DEMERS, A., GREENE, D., HAUSER, C., IRISH, W., AND LARSON, J. 1987. Epidemic algorithms for replicated database maintenance. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '87, Vancouver, BC, Aug. 10-12), F. B. Schneider, Ed. ACM Press, New York, NY, 1-12.]]
[14]
FEIGE, U., PELEG, D., RAGHAVAN, P., AND UPFAL, E. 1990. Rndomized broadcast in networks. Random Struct. Alg. 1, 4, 447-460.]]
[15]
FLOYD, S., JACOBSON, V., MCCANNE, S., LIU, C.-G., AND ZHANG, L. 1995. A reliable multicast framework for light-weight sessions and application level framing. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 25, 4 (Oct.), 342-356. For more information see http://www.aciri.org/floyd/ srm.html.]]
[16]
GOLDING, R. AND TAYLOR, K. 1992. Group membership in the epidemic style. Tech. Rep. UCSC-CRL-92-13. Computer and Information Sciences Department, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA.]]
[17]
Guo, K. 1998. Scalable membership detection protocols. Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Available as Tech. Rep. 98-1684.]]
[18]
HAYDEN, M. 1998. The Ensemble system. Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Available as Tech. Rep. TR 98-1662.]]
[19]
HAYDEN, M. G. AND BIRMAN, K. P. 1996. Probabilistic broadcast. Tech. Rep. TR 96-1606. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.]]
[20]
LABOVITZ, C., MALAN, G., AND JAHANIAN, F. 1997. Internet routing instability. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Communications, Architecture, and Protocols (SIGCOMM '97, Oct.). ACM Press, New York, NY.]]
[21]
LADIN, R., LISKOV, B., SHRIRA, L., AND GHEMAWAT, S. 1992. Providing high availability using lazy replication. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 10, 4 (Nov. 1992), 360-391.]]
[22]
LIDL, K., OSBORNE, J., AND MALCOME, J. 1994. Drinking from the firehose: Multicast USENET news. In Proceedings of USENIX Winter (Jan.). USENIX Assoc., Berkeley, CA, 33-45.]]
[23]
LIN, J. C. AND PAUL, S. 1996. A reliable multicast transport protocol. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computers and Communication (INFOCOM '96). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 1414-1424. See also http://www.bell-labs.com/project/rmtp.]]
[24]
LIU, C.-G. 1997. Error recovery in scalable reliable multicast. Ph.D. Dissertation. Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.]]
[25]
LUCAS, M. 1998. Efficient data distribution in large-scale multicast networks. Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.]]
[26]
OZKASAP, O., XIAO, Z., AND BIRMAN, K. P. 1999. Scalability of two reliable multicast protocols. Tech. Rep. TR 99-1748. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.]]
[27]
PAXSON, V. 1997. End-to-end Internet packet dynamics. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Communications, Architecture, and Protocols (SIGCOMM '97, Oct.). ACM Press, New York, NY, 139-154.]]
[28]
PIANTONI, R. AND STANCESCU, C. 1997. Implementing the Swiss Exchange Trading System. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fault Tolerant Computing Systems (FTCS '97, June). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 309-313.]]
[29]
PAUL, S., SABNANI, K. K., LIN, J. C., AND BHATTACHARYYA, S. 1997. Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol. IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. 15, 3 (Apr.).]]
[30]
VAN RENESSE, R. 1994. Why bother with CATOCS?. ACM SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 28, 1 (Jan. 1994), 22-27.]]
[31]
VAN RENESSE, R., BIRMAN, Z. P., AND MAFFEIS, S. 1996. Horus: a flexible group communication system. Commun. ACM 39, 4, 76-83.]]
[32]
VAN RENESSE, R., MINSKY, Y., AND HAYDEN, M. 1998. Gossip-based failure detection service. In Proceedings of Middleware '98.]]
[33]
XTP FORUM. 1995. Xpress Transfer Protocol specification. XTP Rev. 4.0, 95-20.]]

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Invited Paper: Blockchains made Lightweight: A Median Rule for State Machine ReplicationProceedings of the 2024 Workshop on Advanced Tools, Programming Languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems10.1145/3663338.3665452(1-5)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Optimizing Gossiping for Asynchronous Fault-Prone IoT Networks With Memory and Battery ConstraintsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.334902112(4701-4715)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2023)A Data Flow Framework with High Throughput and Low Latency for Permissioned Blockchains2023 IEEE 43rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00088(1-12)Online publication date: Jul-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Bimodal multicast

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
    ACM Transactions on Computer Systems  Volume 17, Issue 2
    May 1999
    112 pages
    ISSN:0734-2071
    EISSN:1557-7333
    DOI:10.1145/312203
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 01 May 1999
    Published in TOCS Volume 17, Issue 2

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)385
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)53
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Sep 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Invited Paper: Blockchains made Lightweight: A Median Rule for State Machine ReplicationProceedings of the 2024 Workshop on Advanced Tools, Programming Languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems10.1145/3663338.3665452(1-5)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Optimizing Gossiping for Asynchronous Fault-Prone IoT Networks With Memory and Battery ConstraintsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.334902112(4701-4715)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2023)A Data Flow Framework with High Throughput and Low Latency for Permissioned Blockchains2023 IEEE 43rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00088(1-12)Online publication date: Jul-2023
    • (2023)Web3 Sybil avoidance using network latencyComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2023.109701227(109701)Online publication date: May-2023
    • (2022)The Universal Gossip Fighter2022 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)10.1109/IPDPS53621.2022.00116(1162-1172)Online publication date: May-2022
    • (2022)Dino: A Block Transmission Protocol with Low Bandwidth Consumption and Propagation LatencyIEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796837(1319-1328)Online publication date: 2-May-2022
    • (2022)Probabilistic Edge Multicast Routing for the XRP NetworkGLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference10.1109/GLOBECOM48099.2022.10000650(5129-5134)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2022
    • (2022)AS-cast: Lock Down the Traffic of Decentralized Content Indexing at the EdgeAlgorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing10.1007/978-3-031-22677-9_23(433-454)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Formalizing Delayed Adaptive Corruptions and the Security of Flooding NetworksAdvances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 202210.1007/978-3-031-15979-4_14(400-430)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2022
    • (2021)Gossip consensusProceedings of the 22nd International Middleware Conference10.1145/3464298.3493395(198-209)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2021
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Get Access

    Login options

    Full Access

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media