The Multicast Dissemination Protocol (mdp) Toolkit

The Multicast Dissemination Protocol (MDP) provides reliable multicast file and data delivery on top of the generic UDP/IP multicast transport. Early work on MDP was deployed across the global Internet Multicast Backbone (Mbone) as part of the publicly available Image Multicaster (IMM) application. This paper describes more recent work on MDP resulting in the MDP version 2 (MDPv2) toolkit. This recent effort has significantly modified and generalized the MDP protocol and the associated software interface. Enhancements made to the protocol are suitable for a wide range of network environments. Additionally, integrated erasure-based repairing improves reliable multicast efficiency and robustness. We briefly discuss the protocol design, general performance characteristics, and ongoing MDP work including: initial rate-based congestion control design and results, network simulation and modeling, and asymmetric satellite operation.