TCP-SMO: Extending TCP to Support Medium-Scale Multicast Applications

Abstract—Scalable reliable multicast protocols have been a focus of recent research, tackling the problem of efficient reliable data delivery to an arbitrarily large number of receivers. Yet, the common applications of multicast, such as multi-point file delivery, or video streaming from a media server, typically only involve a moderate number of receivers, such as a thousand or fewer. Moreover, because of the limited deployment of these specialized multicast protocols, it is common for applications to instead use multiple TCP connections, one for each receiver, to implement multi-point delivery when feasible, causing a significant demand on the transmission server and the downstream links. In this paper, we describe a multicast extension to TCP, called the Single-source Multicast Optimization (SMO), that optimizes this case of multipoint delivery, providing the benefits of multicast together with the familiar features and API of TCP. Our results from experiments based on a Linux...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Sam Liang, David R. Cheriton
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2002, Multicast, Multicast Protocols, Reliable Multicast Protocols