Spring 2001 

CMPT 885: SPECIAL TOPICS: HIGH-PERFORMANCE NETWORKS




Investigation and Implementation of Reliable Multicast Transport Protocols using ns2
 
Chao Li,  Cheng Lu,  Thomas Su
{clij, clu, tmsu}@cs.sfu.ca,
Abstract

Widespread availability of IP multicast has substantially increased the geographic span  and portability of collaborative multimedia applications. Examples of such applications include distributed shared whiteboards, group editors, and distributed games or simulations. Such applications often involve many participants and typically require a specific form of multicast communication in which a single sender must reliably transmit data to multiple receivers. IP multicast provides scalable and efficient  routing and delivery of IP packets to multiple receivers. However, it does not provide the reliability needed by these type of application.

Our goal is to exploit the highly efficient best-effort delivery mechanism of IP multicast to simulate several scalable and efficient transport protocols for reliable multicast. In this project, we implement and compare different flavors of multicast transport protocols, including Reliable Multicast Protocol, Tree-based Multicast Transport Protocol, and Scalable Reliable Multicast, using ns-2 simulator.  We examine the performance, overhead, and scalability for each chosen protocols in campus network model.  We use carefully chosen  web and FTP background traffic to capture the characteristics of a real network environment. In addition, we use multimedia traffic traces to evaluate each chosen multicast transport protocol.  Based on the simulation, we show the advantage and trade-offs for each of the multicast protocols.
 

Reference
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[11] ns-2 network simulator: http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns

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