Generalized Explicit Multicast (GXcast)

Project Description

Explicit multicast protocols, such as the Xcast protocol, encode the list of group members in the Xcast
header of every packet. If the number of members in a group increases, routers may need to fragment
an Xcast packet. Fragmented packets may not be identi ed as Xcast packets by routers. The Xcast
protocol does not support the IP fragmentation and we show also that avoiding fragmentation induces
hard-coded limits inside the protocol itself in terms of group size. We proposed a generalized version of
the Xcast protocol, called the GXcast protocol, intended to permit the Xcast packets fragmentation and
to support the increasing in the number of members in a multicast group. The GXcast protocol is a
simple generalized version of the Xcast protocol: instead of sending a message to the n destinations, the
source limits the number of destinations in a packet to nM. Thus, the list of n destinations is cutted
into sub-lists of at most nM destinations. Each sub-list corresponds to a destination list for an Xcast
packet. Several packets may have to be sent in order to deliver data to all the n destinations.

Related work

Publications

• Internet Draft : Generalized Explicit Multicast (GXcast)
• Inproceedings Paper : A. Boudani, A. Guitton, B. Cousin. GXcast : une généralisation du protocole Xcast, MAJECSTIC2003, selected as the conference best paper, Marseille, France, October 2003.
• Inproceedings Paper : A. Boudani, A. Guitton, B. Cousin. GXcast: Generalized Explicit Multicast Routing Protocol, the 9th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC 2004), Alexandria, Egypt, June 2004.
• Journal Paper : A. Boudani, A. Guitton, B. Cousin. GXcast : une généralisation du protocole Xcast, ISDM, N 13, February 2004. 
• Rapport de stage: (à publier)  : A. Boudani, Ahlem El Hajj : Proposition d'un support multicast pour les réseaux mobiles (27 Juin 2006).
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Xcast Simulation Project page

Simple Explicit Multicast

• Internet Draft : Simple Explicit Multicast (SEM)
• Inproceedings Paper : A. Boudani, B. Cousin. Sem: A new small group multicast routing protocol. 10th International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT'2003), Tahiti, Papeete, France, February 2003.
  

 SGM-BoF agenda for IETF 48th meeting (July 2000)

Alexandre Guitton Web Page