Application-perceived multicast push performance

Summary form only given. Multicast is an effective and scalable solution to disseminate data in the Internet. Middleware support for multicast-based data dissemination (MSMDD) aims to integrate state-of-the-art data management methods and multicast communication techniques and provide a scalable multicast-based data management layer to applications. By using multicast in MSMDD, the server can disseminate hot documents effectively. To evaluate multicast performance, previous work often utilizes network-level metrics. We employ application level criteria to analyze the multicast push performance in MSMDD. When packets are not lost on links, our result shows that the application-perceived (or client-perceived) performance is independent of the delay from the server to clients; the multicast rate is a major factor for the performance; an end-to-end multicast system achieves almost the same application-perceived performance as IP multicast under the same multicast rates. However, IP multicast can tolerate much more packet losses than the end-to-end multicast system.