RMFP : The Reliable Multicast Framing Protocol

The Reliable Multicast Framing Protocol is a project that is designed to provide an ALF [1] based framework for reliable multicast. The general problem of reliable multicast is seen in the increased complexity in comparison to unicast caused by  application requirements,  scalability requirements, heterogeneity of network and receivers and congestion control.

Although there has been intensive research efforts in reliable multicast protocols in the recent years, no protocol was developed that can provide all functionality required. The RMFP approach to reliable multicast is a environment that allows the integration of different protocols into its structure.


Current state of the project

At the moment RMFP is developed at INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis in the RODEO project. Since RMFP is still under research, there are no stable specifications available.

A first version of a protocol library providing RMFP functionality has been implemented based on the most recent Internet-Draft of RMFP [2]. This library comes with SRM [3] as sole implemented protocol.

Currently there is work ongoing in developing the next version of RMFP. This research focusses on the naming problematics that comes with ALF.
 


Publications

The following papers are the most recent publications, although they are not up-to-date with the current development.


Software

The implemented RMFP library is planned to be released together with the technical report as documentation.
 


Related work

RMF:
The Reliable Multicast Framework is currently developed by the MIST working group.
SRM:
The SRM homepage. The Scalable Reliable Multicast protocol is the only protocol that is currently integrated in RMFP.
LGC:
The LGC homepage. The Local Group Concept [4] developed at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany is a tree-based reliable multicast algorithm. A LGC specification for the integration into RMFP was developed, but has not yet been implemented. The specification will be published as part of the technical report.

References

1
D. Clark and D. Tennenhouse.

Architectural considerations for a new generation of protocols.
In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '90, pages 201-208. ACM, September 1990.
2
J. Crowcroft, L. Vicisano, Z. Wang, A. Ghosh, M. Fuchs, C. Diot and T. Turletti.

RMFP: A Reliable Multicast Framing Protocol.
Internet Draft: draft-crowcroft-rmfp-02.txt, March 1998.
3
Sally Floyd, Van Jacobson, Steven McCanne, Ching-Gung Liu, and Lixia Zhang.

A reliable multicast framework for light-weight sessions and application level framing
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, December 1997, Vol. 5, No 6, pp. 784-803.
4
Markus Hofmann.

Enabling group communication in global networks.
In Proceedings of Global Networking '97, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, June 1997.
5
Michael Fuchs, Christophe Diot, Thierry Turletti, Markus Hofmann.

A Framework for Reliable Multicast in the Internet
INRIA Research Report No 3363, February 1998.

Contacts

  If you have any questions or comments about RMFP, please contact us at our mailing list
Jon Crowcroft University College London, UK 
Lorenzo Vicisano University College London, UK 
Christophe Diot INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France 
Michael Fuchs  INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France and University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Atanu Ghosh UTS, Australia 
Thierry Turletti INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France 
Zheng Wang Bell Labs, USA 
 
 
Michael Fuchs

Last Change: Mar. 13th, 1998 by Thierry Turletti.