Transport protocol requirements for distributed multimedia information systems

The use of transport protocols that support the notion of multicast logical connectivity, both within a single network and an internet environment, is investigated. It is shown that protocols with multicasting capabilities can yield a substantial performance improvement over protocols that support only unicast logical connectivity. Ways in which multicasting can be utilized to suit the present application are proposed. A prototype implementation of a multicast communications facility based on these requirements is presented, and an application model is used to measure the transport protocol performance under various possible system configurations and loads. Results of performance measurements are presented for experiments carried out on an Ethernet-based internet