end-host multicasting in support of distributed real-time simulation systems
There has recently been a tremendous level of interest inthe use of end-host multicast to provide group communicationwithin a wide area network. End-host multicast shiftsthe burden of group-communication support from networkrouters to the host. End-host multicasting is required whenIP multicasting is not available. The difficulty in using thistechnique is that it requires additional resource consumptionwhen compared to native IP multicasting. This paperpresents several novel end-host multicast algorithms designedfor peer-to-peer real-time simulation systems. Ourtechniques utilize application level admission control inorder to more fairly balance the communication load in thephysical network. We propose and evaluate an adaptiverouting policy to find overflow paths between end-hostsand simulation agents placed within the system. We alsopresent several heuristics for routing tree construction,including a simulated annealing approach. We haveevaluated our methods through simulation, and the resultsshow that our methods achieve performance similar to optimalIP multicasting.
end-host multicasting system support for agent-based systems overlay multicasting