Empirical and analytical study of a multicast synchronous transport protocol for intracampus replication services

In this paper, we analyze a multicast protocol called MUST (multicast synchronous transfer), which offers multicast file transfer service to the application layer, in an intracampus environment (several interconnected LAN networks). Synchronicity is one of its more remarkable attributes since MUST guarantees that all clients are receiving the information at the same time. For an efficient bandwidth utilization, MUST transmits IP packets by using multicast addressing. Also, it achieves a notable acknowledgement packets reduction by an appropriate mechanism. Flow control and error recovery algorithms are also developed to satisfy features such as reliability, high throughput and low delay. To evaluate the protocol, we first implemented an application based on it that we extensively tested in a lab with up to ten computers in an intracampus environment. Then, we also developed a mathematical model validating analytically the most important protocol parameters. The methodology used to study this multicast protocol is in fact another contribution and can be extrapolated easily to other protocols.