A hybrid application-layer multicasting protocol for distributed simulations on the Internet

• Main Author: Diabi, Abdelfettah
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: University of Ottawa (Canada) 2013
• Subjects: Computer Science.
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/27213; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-18596

IP multicast is typically used to support message transmission among entities in collaborative virtual simulations running on Intranets, especially military training simulations. But, IP Multicast is mostly not available on the Internet because it is not deployable by ISP's due to undefined billing at the source and unlimited amount of overlay topologies for data transmission. Alternatively, researches have in recent years proposed the use of Application Layer Multicasting techniques (ALM) to alleviate this problem and to allow a somewhat scalable message passing among peers in a group of users on the Internet. As the number of users grows in the session, efficient handling of resources and scalable communication between users becomes critical due to network traffic and computation required to track all objects in the session. In this thesis, peer-to-peer communication architecture for distributed simulation is proposed. The architecture uses both proxies and end-systems to provide a number of communication services: (1) Best effort LAN multicast; (2) Timely-reliable LAN multicast; (3) Best effort peer to peer delivery on the Internet; (4) Timely-reliable peer to peer delivery on the Internet, and (5) Any combination of the above, including LAN to Internet translation and vice versa. The main achievement of this research could be summarized as the design, justification, and implementation of an architecture that, in comparison to others, has higher efficiency and guaranteed reliability for performing tightly synchronous collaborative tasks in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs).