Group unicast for the real world

ABSTRACT

Kernel-based group unicast has been suggested as an efficient mechanism for transmitting the same data to multiple recipients. In this paper, we present a new system call, sendgroup(), which also supports per-recipient private data, but only uses a single inkernel copy of the shared data. We assess the performance of the new system call using micro-benchmarks on three different operating systems. Further, we incorporate sendgroup() into a popular multimedia server and demonstrate an efficiency improvement of ~45% in a representative live-broadcasting scenario. These results show that the new system call is applicable in real-world scenarios, and that its usage can lead to significant performance improvements. Moreover, we demonstrate how Amdahl's Law, when applied to the results of the micro-benchmarks, along with precise analysis of the cost of sending packets, can be used to accurately predict the impact of sendgroup() on this server.

REFERENCES

• 1: M. Ammar, K. Almeroth, R. Clark, and Z. Fei. Multicast Delivery of Web Pages or How to Make Web Servers Pushy. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Internet Server Performance, 1998.
• 2: S. Banerjee, B. Bhattacharjee, and C. Kommareddy. Scalable Application Layer Multicast. Technical Report UMIACS TR-2002, University of Maryland, 2002.
• 3: Yang-hua Chu , Sanjay G. Rao , Hui Zhang, A case for end system multicast (keynote address), Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, p.1-12, June 18-21, 2000, Santa Clara, California, United States
• 4: A. Colwell. Challenges with Developing a Commercial P2P System. In Panel Presentation, NOSSDAV 2007, July 2007.
• 5: S. E. Deering, Multicast routing in internetworks and extended LANs, Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols, p.55-64, August 16-18, 1988, Stanford, California, United States
• 6: C. Diot and L. Gautier. A Distributed Architecture for Multiplayer Interactive Applications on the Internet. IEEE Network, 13(4):6--15, 1999.
• 7: C. Diot, B. N. Levine, B. Lyles, H. Kassem, and D. Balensiefen. Deployment Issues for the IP Multicast Service and Architecture. IEEE Network, 14(1):78--88, 2000.
• 8: Peter Druschel , Larry L. Peterson, Fbufs: a high-bandwidth cross-domain transfer facility, Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.189-202, December 05-08, 1993, Asheville, North Carolina, United States
• 9: K. Fall and J. Pasquale. Exploiting in-kernel data paths to improve i/o throughput and cpu availability.
• 10: P. Francis. Yoid: Your Own Internet Distribution. http://www.aciri.org/yoid.accessed February 2008.
• 11: P. Halvorsen, T. A. Dalseng, and C. Griwodz. Assessment of Linux' Data Path Components for Download and Streaming. The International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 17(4):465--481, 2007.
• 12: Intel. Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer Manual, Volume 3b, 2007.
• 13: John Jannotti , David K. Gifford , Kirk L. Johnson , M. Frans Kaashoek , James W. O'Toole, Jr., Overcast: reliable multicasting with on overlay network, Proceedings of the 4th conference on Symposium on Operating System Design & Implementation, p.14-14, October 22-25, 2000, San Diego, California
• 14: Martin Karsten , Jialin Song , Michael Kwok , Tim Brecht, Efficient operating system support for group unicast, Proceedings of the international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video, June 13-14, 2005, Stevenson, Washington, USA [doi>10.1145/1065983.1066019]
• 15: Michael Kwok , Tim Brecht , Martin Karsten , Jialin Song, Modelling and Improving Group Communication in Server Operating Systems, Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation, p.207-217, September 11-14, 2006 [doi>10.1109/MASCOTS.2006.32]
• 16: T. Maeda and A. Yonezawa. Kernel Mode Linux: Toward an Operating System Protected by a Type Theory. In V. A. Saraswat, editor, 8th Asian Computing Science Conference, pages 3--17, 2003.
• 17: Steven McCanne , Van Jacobson, vic: a flexible framework for packet video, Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Multimedia, p.511-522, November 05-09, 1995, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/217279.215315]
• 18: Erich Nahum , Tsipora Barzilai , Dilip D. Kandlur, Performance issues in WWW servers, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.10 n.1, p.2-11, February 2002 [doi>10.1109/90.986497]
• 19: Vivek S. Pai , Peter Druschel , Willy Zwaenepoel, IO-Lite: a unified I/O buffering and caching system, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.18 n.1, p.37-66, Feb. 2000 [doi>10.1145/332799.332895]
• 20: Dimitrios Pendarakis , Sherlia Shi , Dinesh Verma , Marcel Waldvogel, ALMI: an application level multicast infrastructure, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, p.5-5, March 26-28, 2001, San Francisco, California
• 21: Sylvia Ratnasamy , Andrey Ermolinskiy , Scott Shenker, Revisiting IP multicast, Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, September 11-15, 2006, Pisa, Italy
• 22: The Helix Community. The Helix DNA Server. https://helix-server.helixcommunity.org/.
• 23: The QuakeForge Project. http://quakeforge.net. accessed February 2008.
• 24: Erez Zadok , Sean Callanan , Abhishek Rai , Gopalan Sivathanu , Avishay Traeger, Efficient and Safe Execution of User-Level Code in the Kernel, Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 10, p.221.1, April 04-08, 2005 [doi>10.1109/IPDPS.2005.189]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Network operating systems

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.1 Process Management