An empirical study of reliable multicast protocols over Ethernet-connected networks

Recent advances in multicasting over the Internet present new opportunities for improving communication performance in clusters of workstations. The standard IP multicast, however only supports unreliable multicast, which is difficult to use for building high level message passing routines. Thus, reliable multicast primitives must be implemented over the standard IP multicast to facilitate the use of multicast for high performance communication on clusters of workstations. Although many reliable multicast protocols have been proposed for the wide area Internet environment, the impact of architectural features of local area networks (LANs) on the reliable multicast protocols has not been thoroughly studied. Efficient reliable multicast protocols for LANs must exploit these features to achieve the best performance. In this paper we study four types of reliable multicast protocols: the ACK-based protocols, the NAK-based protocols with polling, the ring-based protocols, and the tree-based protocols. We evaluate the performance of the protocols over Ethernet-connected networks, study the impact of architectural features of the Ethernet on the performance of the protocols, and investigate the methods to exploit these features to achieve the best performance.