A Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol for Communicating Real-Time Distributed Objects

Abstract

The TMO (Time-triggered Message-triggered Object) model is a well-known real-time object model for distributed and timeliness-guaranteed computing. A distributed environment of the model may be configured by a number of the TMO nodes as a private network. It requires high reliability due to the feature of a distributed IPC message. The TCP seems to be suitable to this model. However, if a message needs to be broadcasted or multicasted to the other objects, the more the number of the nodes increases, the less efficient the repetitive unicast delivery of the message is. A multicast transport protocol can be considered to overcome this problem. In this paper, we propose a reliable multicast transport protocol suitable for supporting a distributed environment of the TMO model and discuss its performance with respects to the real-time delivery and throughput comparing with the alternative protocols. Results from the extensive performance measurement demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional TCP and existing RMT protocols.

This research was supported by the MIC (Ministry of Information and Communication), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the IITA (Institute of Information Technology Assessment).