(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1997)
Ammar, Mostafa H.; Fei, Zongming; Almeroth, Kevin C.
The World Wide Web (WWW) has gained tremendously in popularity over the
last several years. Solutions to the problem of overloaded web servers
have included buying more hardware, the use of transparent server
replication and mirroring, and caching of hot pages. Another technique
that can be used in conjunction with these other solutions is the use of
multicast for the delivery of web pages. In this work we explore the use
of UDP, best-effort multicast as a delivery option. Reliability is
achieved through repetitive, cyclic transmission of a requested page. This
solution is expected to be most efficient when used for highly requested
pages. We view this cyclic multicast technique as a delivery option that
can be integrated with the traditional reliable unicast and recently
proposed reliable multicast options. We first describe the architecture
of an integrated web server employing all three delivery options. We
then describe the cyclic multicast technique and consider the various
procedures needed for its successful operation. We characterize the gains
in performance achieved by our proposal through an extensive performance
analysis and simulation of our technique by itself, and when integrated
with the other delivery options. We also describe our experience with an
implementation of a prototype cyclic multicast server and its performance
over the Multicast Backbone (MBone).