Exploiting group communication for reliable high volume data distribution

The design and implementation of a protocol to provide reliable and efficient distribution of large quantities of data to many hosts on a local area network or internetwork is described. By exploiting the one-to-many transmission capabilities of multicast and broadcast, it is possible to transmit data to multiple hosts simultaneously, using less bandwidth and thus obtaining greater efficiency than repeated unicasting. Although performance measurements indicate the superiority of multicast, we dynamically select from available transmission modes so as to maximize efficiency and throughput while providing reliable delivery of data to all hosts. Our results demonstrate that file-distribution programs based on this protocol can benefit from a linear speed-up over TCP-based programs such as rdist