HyperCast: A Protocol for Maintaining Multicast Group Members in a Logical Hypercube Topology

To efficiently support large-scale multicast applications with many thousand simultaneous members, it is essential that protocol mechanisms be available which support efficient exchange of control information between the members of a multicast group. Recently, we proposed the use of a control topology, which organizes multicast group members in a logical n-dimensional hypercube, and transmits all control information along the edges of the hypercube. In this paper, we present the design, verification, and implementation of a protocol, called HyperCast, which maintains members of a large multicast group in a logical hypercube. We use measurement experiments of an implementation of the protocol on a networked computer cluster to quantitatively assess the performance of the protocol for multicast group sizes up to 1024 members. * This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants ANI-9870336 and NCR9624106 (CAREER). # Corresponding Author: J. Liebeherr, [email protected], Tel: +1-804-982-2228, Fax: +1-804-9822214. ♦ Tyler Beam’s work described in this paper was performed while he was with the University of Virginia.