A TAXONOMY OF MULTICAST PROTOCOLS FOR INTERNET APPLICATIONS

The continuous growth in applications that require communications amon g a group of hosts or simultaneous dissemination of data to multiple s ites on the Internet has led to considerable interest in multicast com munication. These applications have different quality of service requi rements such as deadlines to response time and tolerance to data loss. Internet multicast protocols provide a spectrum of sen ices to cater for the needs of a wide array of multicast applications. The design al ternatives of a multicast protocol for a particular application may le ad to different performance characteristics, for example higher utiliz ation of network bandwidth vs lower protocol processing requirements. Therefore a framework is required to various design choices available to design multicast protocols and evaluate the performance tradeoffs a ssociated with these alternatives. Motivated by such a need and by the evolution of multicast applications over the Internet, this article p resents a taxonomy of multicast protocols and a common framework to ev aluate their performance. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.