The World Wide Web has gained tremendously in popularity over the last several years. One solution to the problem of overloaded WWW servers is to use multicast for the delivery of pages. In this work we explore the use of UDP, best-effort multicast as a delivery option.
Reliability is achieved through repetitive, cyclic transmission of a requested page.
We describe the cyclic multicast technique and consider the various procedures needed for its successful operation. We characterize the gains in performance achieved by our proposal through an extensive performance analysis and reference our ongoing work in simulating and implementing a cyclic multicast server.