Communication

Part IV
Multicast Communication*

*Referred to slides by Manhyung Han at Kyung Hee University and Hitesh Ballani at Cornell
University
 Unicast, Broadcast Key:
Unicast transfer

versus Multicast Broadcast transfer

Multicast transfer

• Unicast
– One-to-one
– Destination – unique receiver
host address
• Broadcast
– One-to-all
– Destination – address of
network
• Multicast
– One-to-many
– Multicast group must be
identified
– Destination – address of group
 Multicast application examples

• Financial services
– Delivery of news, stock quotes, financial indices, etc

• Remote conferencing/e-learning
– Streaming audio and video to many participants
(clients, students)
– Interactive communication between participants

• Data distribution
– e.g., distribute experimental data from Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN lab to interested physicists around
the world
 IP multicast
Gatech Stanford

CMU

Berkeley

Routers with multicast support

•Highly efficient bandwidth usage

Key Architectural Decision: Add support for multicast in IP layer
 So what is the big issue …
more than 20 years since proposal, but no wide area IP multicast
deployment

• Scalability (with number of groups)

-- Routers maintain per-group state

• IP Multicast: best-effort multi-point delivery service

-- Providing higher level features such as reliability, congestion
control, flow control, and security has shown to be more difficult
than in the unicast case

Can we achieve efficient multi-point delivery without IP-layer support?

 Application layer multicast
Gatech Stanford Stan1

Stan2

CMU
Berk1

Berkeley

Overlay Tree Berk2

Stan1
Gatech

Stan2
CMU
Berk1
Berk2
 Pros and Cons
• Scalability
– Routers do not maintain per-group state
– End systems do, but they participate in very few groups

• Potentially simplify support for higher level functionality

– Leverage computation and storage of end systems
– Leverage solutions for unicast congestion, error and flow control

• Efficiency concerns
– redundant traffic on physical links
– increase in latency due to end-systems
 System structure
The overlay comprises of :
• A central source (may be replicated for fault tolerance)
• A number of overcast nodes (standard PCs with lot’s of
storage)
- organized into a distribution tree rooted at the source
- bandwidth efficient trees
• Final Consumers – members of the multicast group
- allows unmodified HTTP clients to join
 Bandwidth Efficient Overlay Trees
1

10 Mb/s
R

“…three ways of organizing the root and the nodes into a distribution tree.”

R R 1 2 R 2 1

2
 The node addition algorithm

R R

5
10 10
3 1 2
1 8
7
5

2 3

Physical network substrate Overcast distribution tree

 The client side – how to join a
multicast group
• Clients join a multicast group through a typical HTTP GET
request

• Root determines where to connect the client to the multicast

tree using
– Status of overcast nodes
– Location of client

• Root selects “best” server and redirects the client to that

server
Client Joins Key:
Content query
(multicast join)
Query redirect
Content delivery

1 3
R1 R2 R3

2 4 6

5
 Application level multicasting
• A survey on ALM