Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 20CacheCast: A Single-Source Multiple-Destination Caching Mechanism

Piotr Srebrny¹, Dag H.L. Sørbø¹, Thomas Plagemann¹, Vera Goebel¹, and Andreas Mauthe¹

¹University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

²InfoLab 21, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

20.1 Introduction

The original design of the Internet architecture did not consider the single-source multiple-destination datagram transmission, namely multicast. However, already in the middle 1980s, it was recognized that this functionality is necessary for applications such as distributed databases, distributed computation, or teleconferencing [1, 2]. Applications of this type require efficient multiple-destination data delivery. With content delivery over the Internet being more prominent nowadays, multicast is increasingly becoming a necessary feature. Unfortunately, the Internet still does not support multicast services, and applications must use unicast.

The development of multicast technology has been carried out along two lines. The first direction was set by Aguilar in Reference 1. He proposed to extend the Internet Protocol (IP) header destination field. The extended destination field accommodates a list of data destination addresses. When a source sends a packet to multiple destinations, it lists all destination addresses in the header. This approach does not scale well with the increasing receiver groups size, since with the growing group size there is less space for data. Ultimately, the group size is limited by the maximum ...