but it came right at a time when the industry had kind of just stopped listening to that whole group, and it was built on multicast, which was a dying horse.
but if we had that facility as a widely implemented open standard, things would be much different and arguably much better today.
by 'multicast' here one really means a facility that's provided by layer 3. So yes, we can build our own multicast overlays. But a generic facility had two big benefits. One is that the spanning distribution tree can be built with a knowledge of the actual topology, and copies can be made in the backbone where they belong (copies in the overlay often mean that the data can traverse the same link more than once).
The other big one is access. If we call agree on multicast semantics and addressing, and its built into everyone operating system, then we can all use that as a equal access facility to effectively publish to everyone, not just people who happen to be part of this particular club and are running this particular flavor of multicast.
Comments
alot of the use cases for this would have been covered by protocol designs suggested by Floyd, Jacobson and Zhang in https://www.icir.org/floyd/papers/adapt-web.pdf
but it came right at a time when the industry had kind of just stopped listening to that whole group, and it was built on multicast, which was a dying horse.
but if we had that facility as a widely implemented open standard, things would be much different and arguably much better today.
There's a fascinating research project Librecast [0], funded by the EU via NLnet, that may boost multicast right into modern tech stacks again.
[0] https://www.librecast.net/about.html
What is that used for? Was looking at the documentation but I'm still without understanding the use case they are trying to solve.
Isn't multicasting something already available with UDP or Point-to-Point connections without a single network envolved?
by 'multicast' here one really means a facility that's provided by layer 3. So yes, we can build our own multicast overlays. But a generic facility had two big benefits. One is that the spanning distribution tree can be built with a knowledge of the actual topology, and copies can be made in the backbone where they belong (copies in the overlay often mean that the data can traverse the same link more than once).
The other big one is access. If we call agree on multicast semantics and addressing, and its built into everyone operating system, then we can all use that as a equal access facility to effectively publish to everyone, not just people who happen to be part of this particular club and are running this particular flavor of multicast.