Narrow Results

This paper discusses a group communication protocol to exchange multimedia messages in a group of multiple peer processes. Quality of Service (QoS) required by an application has to be supported. In traditional protocols like RTP, a process can reliably deliver messages to one or more than one process. In the group communication, each process sends a message to multiple processes while receiving messages from multiple processes in a group. Due to the limited computation and communication capacity, we cannot adopt traditional one-to-one or one-to-many transmission ways to the group communication. We propose a notification-based data transmission procedure to exchange multimedia messages among multiple processes so as to satisfy QoS requirement.

The lack of resources in routers will become a crucial issue with the deployment of state storing protocols. In particular, single or any source multicast protocols will most probably take over large amounts of resources for maintaining multicast tree information. The aim of this paper is to study the possibility and benefit of using multiple shortest paths in order for a new member to reach a multicast tree. Such a mechanism would not reduce the overall amount of state information in the network but it would distribute this amount more evenly among all routers. The idea is to use alternate shortest paths provided by the underlying unicast routing protocol to avoid saturated routers, that is, routers that can not or do not want to store any more multicast state information. As the simulation results are very sensitive to the topology, we have used subgraphs of an Internet map. We have then simulated our multipath join mechanism and have found that depending on the tree size, the use of our mechanism can increase successful join attempts by up to 55% when the network is half saturated.