Hash tables – which map “keys ” onto “values” – are an essential building block in modern software systems. We believe a similar functionality would be equally valuable to large distributed systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Content-Addressable Network (CAN) as a distributed infrastructure that provides hash table-like functionality on Internet-like scales. The CAN is scalable, fault-tolerant and completely self-organizing, and we demonstrate its scalability, robustness and low-latency properties through simulation.

Abstract — The conventional wisdom has been that IP is the natural protocol layer for implementing multicast related functionality. However, more than a decade after its initial proposal, IP Multicast is still plagued with concerns pertaining to scalability, network management, deployment and support for higher layer functionality such as error, flow and congestion control. In this paper, we explore an alternative architecture that we term End System Multicast, where end systems implement all multicast related functionality including membership management and packet replication. This shifting of multicast support from routers to end systems has the potential to address most problems associated with IP Multicast. However, the key concern is the performance penalty associated with such a model. In particular, End System Multicast introduces duplicate packets on physical links and incurs larger end-to-end delays than IP Multicast. In this paper, we study these performance concerns in the context of the Narada protocol. In Narada, end systems selforganize into an overlay structure using a fully distributed protocol. Further, end systems attempt to optimize the efficiency of the overlay by adapting to network dynamics and by considering application level performance. We present details of Narada and evaluate it using both simulation and Internet experiments. Our results indicate that the performance penalties are low both from the application and the network perspectives. We believe the potential benefits of transferring multicast functionality from end systems to routers significantly outweigh the performance penalty incurred. I.

The demand for streaming multimedia applications is growing at an incredible rate. In this paper, we propose Bayeux, an efficient application-level multicast system that scales to arbitrarily large receiver groups while tolerating failures in routers and network links. Bayeux also includes specific mechanisms for load-balancing across replicate root nodes and more efficient bandwidth consumption. Our simulation results indicate that Bayeux maintains these properties while keeping transmission overhead low. To achieve these properties, Bayeux leverages the architecture of Tapestry, a fault-tolerant, wide-area overlay routing and location network.

Most currently proposed solutions to application-level multicast organize the group members into an application-level mesh over which a DistanceVector routing protocol, or a similar algorithm, is used to construct source-rooted distribution trees. The use of a global routing protocol limits the scalability of these systems. Other proposed solutions that scale to larger numbers of receivers do so by restricting the multicast service model to be single-sourced. In this paper, we propose an application-level multicast scheme capable of scaling to large group sizes without restricting the service model to a single source. Our scheme builds on recent work on Content-Addressable Networks (CANs). Extending the CAN framework to support multicast comes at trivial additional cost and, because of the structured nature of CAN topologies, obviates the need for a multicast routing algorithm. Given the deployment of a distributed infrastructure such as a CAN, we believe our CAN-based multicast scheme offers the dual advantages of simplicity and scalability.

The IP multicast model allows scalable and efficient multi-party communication, particularly for groups of large size. However, deployment of IP multicast requires substantial infrastructure modifications and is hampered by a host of unresolved open problems. To circumvent this situation, we have designed and implemented ALMI, an application level group communication middleware, which allows accelerated application deployment and simplified network configuration, without the need of network infrastructure support. ALMI is tailored toward support of multicast groups of relatively small size (several I Os of members) with many to many semantics. Session participants are connected via a vir- tual multicast tree, which consists of unicast connections between end hosts and is formed as a minimum spanning tree (MST) using application-specific performance metric. Using simulation, we show that the performance penalties, introduced by this shift of multicast to end systems, is a relatively small increase in traffic load and that ALMI multicast trees approach the efficiency of IP multicast trees. We have also implemented ALMi as a Java based middleware package and performed experiments over the Internet. Experimental results show that ALMI is able to cope with network dynamics and keep the mul- ticast tree efficient.

We propose a new scheme for content distribution of large files that is based on network coding. With network coding, each node of the distribution network is able to generate and transmit encoded blocks of information. The randomization introduced by the coding process eases the scheduling of block propagation, and, thus, makes the distribution more efficient. This is particularly important in large unstructured overlay networks, where the nodes need to make decisions based on local information only. We compare network coding to other schemes that transmit unencoded information (i.e. blocks of the original file) and, also, to schemes in which only the source is allowed to generate and transmit encoded packets. We study the performance of network coding in heterogeneous networks with dynamic node arrival and departure patterns, clustered topologies, and when incentive mechanisms to discourage free-riding are in place. We demonstrate through simulations of scenarios of practical interest that the expected file download time improves by more than 20-30 % with network coding compared to coding at the server only and, by more than 2-3 times compared to sending unencoded information. Moreover, we show that network coding improves the robustness of the system and is able to smoothly handle extreme situations where the server and nodes departure the system.

There is an increasing need to quickly and efficiently learn network distances, in terms of metrics such as latency or bandwidth, between Internet hosts. For example, Internet content providers often place data and server mirrors throughout the Internet to improve access latency for clients, and it is necessary to direct clients to the closest mirrors based on some distance metric in order to realize the benefit of mirrors. We suggest a scalable Internet-wide architecture, called IDMaps, which measures and disseminates distance information on the global Internet. Higher-level services can collect such distance information to build a virtual distance map of the Internet and estimate the distance between any pair of IP addresses. We present our solutions to the measurement server placement and distance map construction problems in IDMaps. We show that IDMaps can indeed provide useful distance estimations to applications such as closest-mirror selection. 1 Keywords: network service, distributed algorithms, scalability, modeling. 1

Distributed computer architectures labeled “peer-to-peer ” are designed for the sharing of computer resources (content, storage, CPU cycles) by direct exchange, rather than requiring the intermediation or support of a centralized server or authority. Peer-to-peer architectures are characterized by their ability to adapt to failures and

Abstract—Application-layer multicast supports group applications without the need for a network-layer multicast protocol. Here, applications arrange themselves in a logical overlay network and transfer data within the overlay. In this paper, we present an application-layer multicast solution that uses a Delaunay triangulation as an overlay network topology. An advantage of using a Delaunay triangulation is that it allows each application to locally derive next-hop routing information without requiring a routing protocol in the overlay. A disadvantage of using a Delaunay triangulation is that the mapping of the overlay to the network topology at the network and data link layer may be suboptimal. We present a protocol, called Delaunay triangulation (DT protocol), which constructs Delaunay triangulation overlay networks. We present measurement experiments of the DT protocol for overlay networks with up to 10 000 members, that are running on a local PC cluster with 100 Linux PCs. The results show that the protocol stabilizes quickly, e.g., an overlay network with 10 000 nodes can be built in just over 30 s. The traffic measurements indicate that the average overhead of a node is only a few kilobits per second if the overlay network is in a steady state. Results of throughput experiments of multicast transmissions (using TCP unicast connections between neighbors in the overlay network) show an achievable throughput of approximately 15 Mb/s in an overlay with 100 nodes and 2 Mb/s in an overlay with 1000 nodes. Index Terms—Application-layer multicasting, Delaunay triangulation, group communication, multicasting.

Multicast services can be provided either as a basic network service or as an application-layer service. Higher level multicast implementations often provide more sophisticated features, and can provide multicast services, where no network layer support is available. Overlay multicast networks offer an intermediate option, potentially combining the flexibility and advanced features of application layer multicast with the greater efficiency of network layer multicast. Overlay multicast networks play an important role in the Internet. Indeed, since Internet Service Providers have been slow to enable IP multicast in their networks, Internet multicast is only widely available as an overlay service. This paper introduces several routing algorithms that are suitable for overlay multicast networks and evaluates their performance. The algorithms seek to optimize the endto -end delay and the interface bandwidth usage at the routing sites within the overlay network. The interface bandwidth is typically a key resource for an overlay network provider, and needs to be carefully managed in order to maximize the number of sessions that can be served. The simultaneous optimization of both delay and bandwidth is an NP-hard problem. We propose several heuristic algorithms and simulate their performance under various traffic conditions and on various network topologies.