Throughput stability of reliable multicast protocols

Abstract

Traditional reliable multicast protocols depend on assumptions about flow control and reliability mechanisms, and they suffer from a kind of interference between these mechanisms. This in turn affects the overall performance, throughput and scalability of group applications utilizing these protocols. However, there exists a substantial class of distributed applications for which the throughput stability guarantee is indispensable. Pbcast protocol is a new option in scalable reliable multicast protocols that offers throughput stability, scalability and a bimodal delivery guarantee as the key features. In this paper, we focus on the throughput stability of reliable multicast protocols. We describe an experimental model developed for Pbcast and virtually synchronous protocols on a real system. We then give the analysis results of our study.