A decentralized software bus based on IP multicasting

We describe a decentralized reconfigurable implementation of a conference management system based on the low-level Internet Protocol (IP) multicasting protocol. Each conference is structured as a software bus-a messaging system that provides a run-time interconnection model that acts as a separate agent (i.e., the bus) for routing, queuing, and delivering messages between distributed programs. Current software bus implementations like, however, rely on a centralized bus process and point-to-point protocols (i.e., TCP/IP) to route, queue, and deliver messages. We implement a software bus called the MULTIBUS that relies on a separate process only for routing and uses a reliable IP multicasting protocol for delivery of messages. The multicasting approach is scalable to large numbers of participants and allows for bus reconfigurations during system execution without notifying other participants of new IP addresses