Failsafe routing and multicasting in dynamic internets
Reliability is an important requirement in network communication. Many distributed applications rely on exchanging information reliably in the presence of host crashes and network failures. In this thesis, our concern is on developing reliable procedures for routing and multicasting in networks that are subject to frequent changes in traffic load and topology. The routing procedures described in this thesis continue to reconstruct routes and forward messages correctly in the face of such changes, but they do not guarantee that a given message will be delivered at the destination. Such guarantees are left to higher layer transport protocols. While point-to-point transport protocols are well understood, little work has been done on network level protocols for reliable delivery of multicast messages. The multicasting procedures that we develop do provide certain guarantees regarding message delivery, even in the presence of network faults. In this thesis, we distinguish between network level multicast and application level multicast. The former procedure deals with message delivery from one source host to several destination hosts, while the latter deals with message delivery from one source process to multiple destination processes, several of which may reside on the same host. Application level multicast makes use of network level multicast facilities, while imposing additional reliability requirements dealing with process failures, host crashes, etc.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign