MULTICAST RESPONSE HANDLING TAXONOMY

Distributed systems and local area networks have both contributed to the development of applications not normally found in 'traditional' single processor systems. Applications using multicast communication illustrate this development since they can involve many receivers (in a one-to-many transmission) or many transmitters (in a many-to-one reception). A method is presented here of classifying multicast applications, networks and distributed systems based upon the number of responses an entity expects to receive after transmitting a message to the members of a multicast set. The taxonomy is used to describe multicast response handling in a variety of networks, implementations and applications.