Application-perceived multicast push performance

Abstract

Multicast is an effective and scalable solution to disseminate data in the Internet. Middleware support for multicast-based data dissemination (MSMDD) aims to integrate state-of-the-art data management methods and multicast communication techniques and provide a scalable multicast-based data management layer to applications. By using multicast in MSMDD, the server can disseminate hot documents effectively. To evaluate multicast performance, previous work often utilizes network-level metrics. In this paper, we employ application level criteria to analyze the multicast push performance in MSMDD. When packets are not lost on links, our result shows that the applicationperceived (or client-perceived) performance is independent of the delay from the server to clients; the multicast rate is a major factor for the performance; an end-to-end multicast system achieves almost the same application-perceived performance as IP multicast under the same multicast rates. However, IP multicast can tolerate much more packet losses than the end-to-end multicast system.