Multicast Address Research Articles

Survey of multicast address handling techniques for Ethernet communication controllers

Ethernet is a local area network that has been used widely in the study and development of distributed applications, including those requiring multicast (or one-to-many) communications, as well as those supporting process migration and load balancing. Although Ethernet has been designed to support multicast addressing, processors are often forced to perform extra processing when receiving a multicast packet, since most available Ethernet hardware only supports partial address filtering. In this paper, a survey of the multicast address handling techniques used by a number of Ethernet communication controllers is presented. The design of a communication controller that can minimize the processor overheads associated with handling packets sent with multicast address is also discussed.

A kernel for high-performance multicast communications

A kernel is described, called the link kernel, for high-performance interprocess communication among shared-memory multiprocessors using an Ethernet. The link kernel provides asynchronous multicast communication service without protocol overhead. Links are created by listeners, and processes may be simultaneously talkers and listeners. Processes access links through a global link table. Multicast addresses are site-independent, so communication is independent of process locations in the network. Communication is asynchronous, so much of the overhead of message management is masked by parallel computation.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>