Using multicast communications to distribute code and data in wide area networks

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation and use of a prototype multicast late‐binding RPC (LbRPC) system. The system provides a mechanism for exporting arbitrary code and data across a wide area internetwork to multiple hosts for evaluation. This mechanism provides a means to ensure that the total execution time for the application is as small as possible without requiring continual monitoring and estimation of the state of the hosts and the intervening network. The impact of sending the same code and data to a group of remote hosts is minimized by using multicast Internet protocol (IP) communications for the outward leg of the transaction. This prototype implementation demonstrates the feasibility of using multicasting for process placement and some performance measurements are included to show how it stands up to usage on the Internet. The paper concludes with a discussion of outstanding issues raised by this research.

Enhancing the Web's infrastructure: from caching to replication

“…Such write operations tend to be much more involved in an unreliable environment as set up by the Internet than in more easily controllable local area networks where most work on this topic has been performed so far. However, as multicasting on wide-area networks becomes more commonplace than it is today, techniques like those presented in [10] might be considered in the future.…”

World Wide Web caching: the application-level view of the Internet

“…Various further topics exist that appear to be worthwhile to be considered in this context. Especially in the area of inter-cache communication techniques, different concepts have been proposed, like using multicasting to disseminate informations [X, KnG95] as well as locate replicated data [X, MLB95]. Due to the inherent non-scalability and the lack of a widely available infrastructure for multicasting on the Internet, these approaches are currently of no practical use.…”