Efficient multicast e-services over APPCAST

Multicasting is well known as a bandwidth conserving technology. Applications couldn´t exploit broadcast media property or reduce redundant packets´ movement over common paths of network as the applications are written in unicast mode. This is due to complex multicast application programming support and the high abstraction TCP/IP provides over the underlying physical media. Researchers turned to alternate multicast mechanisms like application layer multicast-ALM, where in participating hosts are arranged in overlay topologies like tree, mesh etc and hosts route data among themselves in normal unicast mode. We discuss a new application layer overlay&APPCAST and show common application architecture for both unicast and multicast using SOAP with no special effort from programmer for multicast. Architecture also allows exploiting broadcast nature of media.