Continuous multicast push of Web documents over the Internet
Pablo Rodriguez1998, IEEE Network
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Abstract
The success of the World Wide Web has led to a steep increase in the user population and the amount of traffic on the Internet. Popular Web pages create "hot spots" of network load due to their great demand for bandwidth and increase the response time because of the overload on the Web servers. We propose the distribution of very popular and frequently changing Web documents using continuous multicast push (CMP). The benefits of CMP in the case of such documents are a very efficient use of network resources, a reduction of the load on the server, lower response times, and scalability for an increasing number of receivers. We present a quantitative evaluation of the continuous multicast push for a wide range of parameters. that change frequently, a continuous multicast push (CMP) can offer significant benefits in terms of load reduction, bandwidth savings, reduced response times, and scalability for the growing number of receivers. We view CMP as one of the three complementary delivery options integrated in a Web server: Unicast, AMP, and CMP: Unicast Pull: The document is sent as a response to a user's pull request. This delivery method is used for documents that are rarely requested. Asynchronous Multicast Push (AMP): Requests for the same document are accumulated over a small time interval, and answered together via multicast. This delivery method is used for popular documents that have multiple requests over limited period of time. Continuous Multicast Push (CMP): A document is continuously multicasted on the same multicast address. This delivery method is used for very popular documents that change very frequently and that are not worth caching. A Web server using CMP continuously multicasts the latest version of a popular Web document on a multicast address (every document is assigned a different multicast address). Receivers tune into the multicast group for the time required to reliably receive the document and then leave the group. In order to achieve a reliable document delivery, we propose the use of a forward error correction code (FEC) in combination with cyclic transmissions (see Section 3.4).
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