A Case For End System Multicast

Yang-hua Chu, Sanjay Rao and Hui Zhang

Carnegie Mellon University

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 Unicast Transmission Stanford
Gatech

CMU

Berkeley
End Systems
Routers

2
 IP Multicast
Gatech Stanford

CMU

Berkeley

Routers with multicast support

•No duplicate packets

•Highly efficient bandwidth usage
Key Architectural Decision: Add support for multicast in IP layer
3
 Key Concerns with IP Multicast
• Scalability with number of groups
– Routers maintain per-group state
– Analogous to per-flow state for QoS guarantees
– Aggregation of multicast addresses is complicated
• Supporting higher level functionality is difficult
– IP Multicast: best-effort multi-point delivery service
– End systems responsible for handling higher level functionality
– Reliability and congestion control for IP Multicast complicated
• Deployment is difficult and slow
– ISP’s reluctant to turn on IP Multicast

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 The billion dollar question...
• Can we achieve
efficient multi-point delivery,
without support from the IP layer?

5
 End System Multicast
CMU Gatech Stan1
Stanford

Stan2

Berk1

Berkeley

Overlay Tree Berk2

Stan1
Gatech

Stan2
CMU
Berk1
Berk2
6
 Potential Benefits
Scalability
• Routers do not maintain per-group state
–
End systems do, but they participate in very few groups
–
Easier to deploy
•
Potentially simplifies support for higher level functionality
• Leverage computation and storage of end systems
–
For example, for buffering packets, transcoding, ACK aggregation
–
Leverage solutions for unicast congestion control and reliability
–

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 What I hope to convince you of ...
• End System Multicast is a promising alternative approach for multi-
point delivery
– Narada: A distributed protocol for constructing efficient overlay trees among
end systems
– Simulation and Internet evaluation results to demonstrate that Narada can
achieve good performance

• Consider applications with small and sparse groups

– Around tens to hundreds of members

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 Performance Concerns
Delay from CMU to Stan1
Gatech Berk1 increases
Stan2
CMU

Berk2
Berk1

Duplicate Packets: Gatech

Stan1
Bandwidth Wastage

CMU Stan2

Berk1

Berk2
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 What is an efficient overlay tree?
• The delay between the source and receivers is small
• Ideally,
– The number of redundant packets on any physical link is low
Heuristic we use:
– Every member in the tree has a small degree
– Degree chosen to reflect bandwidth of connection to Internet

CMU CMU CMU

Stan2 Stan2 Stan2
Stan1 Stan1 Stan1
Berk1 Gatech Berk1 Gatech
Berk1 Gatech
Berk2 Berk2 Berk2
High latency High degree (unicast) “Efficient” overlay
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 Why is self-organization hard?
• Dynamic changes in group membership
– Members may join and leave dynamically
– Members may die
• Limited knowledge of network conditions
– Members do not know delay to each other when they join
– Members probe each other to learn network related information
– Overlay must self-improve as more information available
• Dynamic changes in network conditions
– Delay between members may vary over time due to congestion

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 Narada Design
“Mesh”: Richer overlay that may have cycles and
Step 1 includes all group members
• Members have low degrees
• Shortest path delay between any pair of members along mesh is small

•Source rooted shortest delay spanning trees of mesh

Step 2
•Constructed using well known routing algorithms
– Members have low degrees
– Small delay from source to receivers

Stan1 CMU
CMU Stan2
Stan2
Stan1

Berk2 Gatech Berk2 Berk1 Gatech

Berk1
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 Narada Components
• Mesh Management:
– Ensures mesh remains connected in face of membership changes
• Mesh Optimization:
– Distributed heuristics for ensuring shortest path delay between
members along the mesh is small
• Spanning tree construction:
– Routing algorithms for constructing data-delivery trees
– Distance vector routing, and reverse path forwarding

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 Optimizing Mesh Quality
CMU
Stan2
Stan1 A poor overlay
topology
Berk1 Gatech1

Gatech2

• Members periodically probe other members at random

• New Link added if
Utility Gain of adding link > Add Threshold
• Members periodically monitor existing links
• Existing Link dropped if
Cost of dropping link < Drop Threshold

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 The terms defined
• Utility gain of adding a link based on
– The number of members to which routing delay improves
– How significant the improvement in delay to each member is
• Cost of dropping a link based on
– The number of members to which routing delay increases, for either neighbor
• Add/Drop Thresholds are functions of:
– Member’s estimation of group size
– Current and maximum degree of member in the mesh

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 Desirable properties of heuristics
• Stability: A dropped link will not be immediately readded
• Partition Avoidance: A partition of the mesh is unlikely to
be caused as a result of any single link being dropped
CMU CMU
Stan2 Stan2
Stan1 Stan1
Probe
Gatech1 Gatech1
Berk1 Berk1

Gatech2
Probe
Gatech2

Delay improves to Stan1, CMU Delay improves to CMU, Gatech1

but marginally. and significantly.
Do not add link! Add link!
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 CMU
Stan2
Stan1

Berk1 Gatech1

Gatech2

Used by Berk1 to reach only Gatech2 and vice versa.

Drop!!

CMU
Stan2
Stan1

Berk1 Gatech1

Gatech2

An improved mesh !!

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 Narada Evaluation
• Simulation experiments
• Evaluation of an implementation on the Internet

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 Performance Metrics

Delay from CMU to Stan1

Gatech Berk1 increases
Stan2
CMU Berk1 Berk2
Gatech Stan1
Stress = 2
CMU Stan2
Berk1

Berk2
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 Factors affecting performance
• Topology Model
– Waxman Variant
– Mapnet: Connectivity modeled after several ISP backbones
– ASMap: Based on inter-domain Internet connectivity
• Topology Size
– Between 64 and 1024 routers
• Group Size
– Between 16 and 256
• Fanout range
– Number of neighbors each member tries to maintain in the mesh

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 Simulation Details
Simulator
• Packet-level and event-based
–
Models propagation delay of physical links
–
Does not model queuing delay and packet loss
–
Individual Experiment Description
• All group members join in random sequence in first 100 seconds
–
No change in group membership after 100 seconds
–
One sender picked at random and multicasts data at constant rate
–

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Delay in typical run
4 x unicast delay 1x unicast delay

Waxman : 1024 routers, 3145 links

Group Size : 128
Fanout Range : <3-6> for all members

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Stress in typical run
Native Multicast

Narada : 14-fold reduction in

worst-case stress !

Naive Unicast

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Variation with group size

Waxman model: 1024 routers, 3145 links

Fanout Range: <3-6>

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Variation with topology model

Waxman

Mapnet
ASMap

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 Implementation Status
• Implemented and ported to Linux and Sun
• Available as library that can be compiled with applications
• Examining how applications written with IP Multicast
API can be used without source-code modification

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 Internet Evaluation
• 13 hosts, all join the group at about the same time
• No further change in group membership
• Each member tries to maintain 2-4 neighbors in the mesh
• Host at CMU designated source
UWisc
14 UMas
s
10
UIUC2 CMU1
1 10
UIUC1 1
CMU2 11
3
1 UDe
Berkeley 38 Virginia1 l
8 UKY 1 15
Virginia2
UCSB
13
GATech
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Narada Delay Vs. Unicast Delay
2x unicast delay 1x unicast delay
(ms)

Internet Routing
can be sub-optimal

(ms)

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 Related Work
• Yoid (Paul Francis, ACIRI)
– More emphasis on architectural aspects, less on performance
– Uses a shared tree among participating members
• More susceptible to a central point of failure
• Distributed heuristics for managing and optimizing a tree are
more complicated as cycles must be avoided
• Scattercast (Chawathe et al, UC Berkeley)
– Emphasis on infrastructural support and proxy-based multicast
• To us, an end system includes the notion of proxies
– Also uses a mesh, but differences in protocol details

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 Conclusions
• Proposed in 1989, IP Multicast is not yet widely deployed
– Per-group state, control state complexity and scaling concerns
– Difficult to support higher layer functionality
– Difficult to deploy, and get ISP’s to turn on IP Multicast
• Is IP the right layer for supporting multicast functionality?
• For small-sized groups, an end-system overlay approach
– is feasible
– has a low performance penalty compared to IP Multicast
– has the potential to simplify support for higher layer functionality
– allows for application-specific customizations

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