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Summary: 1
A Case for End System Multicast
Yang-hua Chu, Sanjay G. Rao, Srinivasan Seshan and Hui Zhang
Carnegie Mellon University
Email: {yhchu,sanjay,srini+,hzhang}@cs.cmu.edu
Abstract-- The conventional wisdom has been that IP is the
natural protocol layer for implementing multicast related func-
tionality. However, more than a decade after its initial proposal,
IP Multicast is still plagued with concerns pertaining to scala-
bility, network management, deployment and support for higher
layer functionality such as error, flow and congestion control. In
this paper, we explore an alternative architecture that we term
End System Multicast, where end systems implement all mul-
ticast related functionality including membership management
and packet replication. This shifting of multicast support from
routers to end systems has the potential to address most prob-
lems associated with IP Multicast. However, the key concern is
the performance penalty associated with such a model. In par-
ticular, End System Multicast introduces duplicate packets on
physical links and incurs larger end-to-end delays than IP Mul-
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