Semantically reliable multicast: current status and future work

Abstract

In multicast communication systems, a single perturbed recipient can drastically affect the performance of a complete group of processes. One way to alleviate this problem is to weakeri reliability requirements by aliowing some messages to be omitted. We propose a multicast service that exploits semantic knowledge to select which messges can be omitted without compromising the application's correctness. This service is basecf on the concept of message obsolescence: A message becomes obsolete when its content is overwritten or implicitly conveyed by a subsequent message. Besides summarizing initial research results [10] showing that message obsolescence can be expressed in a generic way imd can be used to achieve a higher stable throughput, this text advances a definition of the service and outlines our current research directions.