IMPLEMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A TCP-BASED MULTICASTING PROTOCOL IN A REAL-WORLD ENVIRONMENT
JOHN C. RUSSELL · 2004
Traditionally, multicast data transmission has been accomplished over the UDP protocol. However, there are many advantages to using TCP, including congestion control and guaranteed in-order delivery. There are many current research projects striving to implement multicast over TCP. One example is TCP-SMO, currently being developed at Stanford University. Many TCP based multicast protocols target very large scale applications, conceivably having millions of receivers. This introduces complexity to their design, which TCP-SMO avoids by targeting mid-to-large scale applications having a few hundred or thousands of receivers. As a result, the implementation of TCP-SMO is relatively simple, requiring less than one thousand lines of code to be changed in the TCP implementation. However, much of the research into TCP-SMO has been done in a laboratory environment. In this paper, we propose to study TCP-SMO’s performance in a real-world environment. We propose to implement TCP-SMO on a Linux operating system serviced by a broadband cable ISP. Our Linux machine will multicast packets to a number of receivers located across the internet. We can then alter the implementation, i.e., alter queuing algorithms, ACK processing algorithms, and congestion control and avoidance mechanisms to further study and improve TCP-SMO’s performance. 2.