Subject: Alive reliable protocols

From: Samuel Tardieu <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 Jun 1997 16:15:48 +0200

I am in need of a reliable protocol lying on top of IP multicast to
transmit data in a reliable way from/to a moving[1] set of hosts.

While searching for reliable multicast transport protocols on the WWW
I got several answers (RAMP, MTP) but these documents were produced in 
1993 or 1994, three or four years ago.

Are these protocols still up-to-date and used? If there is some more
recent research in this area, I'd be happy if someone could give me
some addresses of WWW sites or some RFC references.

What I am looking for is a protocol which would require no additionnal 
third-party server[2].

Thanks in advance.

  Sam

Footnotes: 
[1]  By moving I mean that hosts can join and leave the group at any moment
[2]  My goal is to remove the single point of failure in a dynamic
     distributed application, so a "master" (such as the one found in
     MTP) would be unusable in my case
-- 
Samuel Tardieu -- [email-masked]

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From: Tristan Daude <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 17:31:31 +0200 (MDT)

Hi,

looks like RMP (Reliable Multicast Protocol) might fit your needs.

Check out: 
	http://research.ivv.nasa.gov/RMP/

Cheers,

  Tristan
--
Tristan Daude, Technische Universitaet Muenchen,  Institut fuer Informatik
               Arcisstr. 21, D-80290 Muenchen, Germany, +49 89 450552-24
Email: [email-masked]
WWW:   http://www11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/local/persons/daude.html

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From: "James E. [Jed] Donnelley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 09:36:27 -0700 (PDT)

>some addresses of WWW sites or some RFC references.

If you aren't aware of:

http://hill.lut.ac.uk/DS-Archive/MTP.html

you certainly should be.  It seems to me to be a good reference for
the sort of reliable multicast techniques that you seem to be looking
for.  It has at least one 1997 entry, so I would say it is still being
supported (though you might ask Jon how actively he is supporting this
list and how complete he thinks it is - Jon?).

The above is one of many multicast references in the Computer and
Communication index site that I help support: http://www.cmpcmm.com/cc/
You can find it there by searching for "reliable", "transport", or
"multicast" or combinations.

Good luck in your quest.

Jed Donnelley    [email-masked]   Phone: (510) 422-4309
http://www.webstart.com/jed/    FAX: (510) 423-1355

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From: Jon Knight <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 19:01:42 +0100 (BST)

> list and how complete he thinks it is - Jon?).

I'm still putting stuff into it that people send me, and weeding out links
that die off, but its not an active part of my research anymore (it was a
spin off of my PhD lit. survey which is now thankfully over and done with
:-) ) so its probably not very complete.  Not to mention the fact that the
multicast comms arena is getting bigger and bigger everyday.

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 Jun 1997 21:22:45 +0200

> transmit data in a reliable way from/to a moving[1] set of hosts.

Since the mailing list is getting into the annual "yes, I've got an
R-MC protocol, too" mode, I thought I might add a few things.

First, reliable multicast is the topic of an IETF research group.
The reason this work was allocated there and not simply moved into the
standards process in an IETF group is that some issues about the wide
deployment of multicast reliability are not yet fully understood in
the research community, let alone developed in finished protocol
proposals.  Unfortunately, http://www.irtf.org does not list the RM RG
yet; look at http://mash.cs.berkeley.edu/irtf/rm.html for now.

Second, MTP (described in RFC1301) is an interesting protocol for a
certain class of applications, so interesting in fact that we defined
a workable version of the protocol (MTP-2) and implemented it.  The
main goals were to get rid of the single point of failure of MTP and
to increase the efficiency for small messages.  A really prototypish
implementation is freely available at
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de:/pub/local/kbs/mtp/mtp-2 .

Recently, we have started adding a self organizing form of local
retransmission to MTP-2.  The details are in an already expired
Internet-Draft which can be retrieved via the MTP/SO page
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nilss/som/som.htm .

Third, while I don't know what your "moving" requirements are exactly,
they may be similar to those experienced by the DIS folks, who
generally need only a relatively weak form of reliability, but a high
join/leave turnover for their geographic groups and in particular low,
bounded latencies.

Gruesse, Carsten

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From: Stephen Casner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 12:15:39 -0700 ()

> transmit data in a reliable way from/to a moving[1] set of hosts.

I think the right list for this discussion would be the mailing list
of the Reliable Multicast Research Group of the IRTF:

    [email-masked]
							-- Steve

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From: Dave Kristol <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 11:01:28 -0400

Samuel Tardieu wrote:
> [...]

In addition to the other stuff mentioned already, check
	http://www.bell-labs.com/project/rmtp/

Dave Kristol