Distribution of information across IP based networks is today part of our everyday life. IP is the backbone of the Internet and most office networks. We use IP to access web pages, listen to radio, and to create computation clusters. All these examples use bandwidth, and bandwidth is a limited resource.
Many applications distribute the same information to multiple receivers, but in many cases the same information is sent to a single receiver at a time, thus multiple copies of the same information is sent, thus consuming bandwidth.
What if the information could be broadcasted to all the clients at the same time, similar to a television broadcast. TCP/IP provides some means to do that. For example UDP supports broadcasting; the problem faced when using UDP is that it’s not reliable. There is no guarantee that the information actually reaches the clients.
This study in Computer Science aims to investigate the problems and solutions of how to achieve reliable distribution of fixed size data sets using a non reliable multicast communication channel, like UDP, in a LAN environment.
The thesis defines a protocol (Almost Reliable Multicast Protocol – Arm-P) that provides maximum scalability for delivery of versioned data sets that are designed to work in a LAN-environment. A proof-of-concept application is implemented for testing purposes.
Source: Linköping University
Author: Jonsson, Fredrik