TRANSACTIONS INVOLVING MULTICAST

Multicast is concurrent data transmission to a well-defined and restricted set of destinations. Although this would seem to be a useful facility for many applications in distributed computing very little use is made of it in practice. This is in spite of the fact that several multicast protocols exist which offer one or more multicast primitives to the applications programmer. This paper investigates the reasons for their limited acceptance, discussing the difficulties involved in using multicast, and where applicable, gives a review of approaches and solutions to be found in the literature.