Vartalaap: a Distributed Multicast Communication System

With the increasing proliferation of computer networks and distributed systems, there is a growing number of applications using multicast communication. This paper presents the Vartalaap system developed at IIT, Bombay. Vartalaap is an hierarchical distributed system for multicast communication over a network, implemented in a hardware-independent fashion. The multicast is achieved without resorting to unnecessary broadcasting of messages over the network. Issues covered in this paper include the primitives for multicast, the multicast model and the system architecture. We discuss the implementation of Vartalaap and compare it with some other systems. We conclude with a discussion on the limitations of the current implementation and directions for future work.