This paper presents a performance evaluation of NAK-based reliable multicast communication protocols operating in an environment where end-to-end delay are heterogeneous. In the case of heterogeneous delay, performance of a timer-based retransmission control scheme may become worse. We show that a counter-based retransmission control scheme works well in the case of heterogeneous transmission delay. We also compare two NAK-based protocols and show that a NAK-multicasting protocol outperforms a NAK-unicasting protocol from the viewpoint of scalability even when delays are heterogeneous.

In recent years, much work has been devoted to developing protocols and architectures for supporting the growing trend of data-oriented services. One drawback of many of these proposals is the need to upgrade or replace all the routers in order for the new systems to work. Among the few systems that allow for gradual deployment is the recently-proposed Breadcrumbs technique for distributed coordination among caches in a cache network. Breadcrumbs uses information collected locally at each cache during past downloads to support in-network guiding of current requests to desired content. Specifically, during content download a series of short-term pointers, called breadcrumbs, is set up along the download path. Future requests for this content are initially routed towards the server which holds (a copy of) this content. However, if this route leads the request to a Breadcrumbs-supporting router, this router re-directs the request in the direction of the latest downloaded, using the aforementioned pointers. Thus, content requests are initially forwarded by a location ID (e.g., IP address), but encountering a breadcrumb entry can cause a shift over to content-based routing. This property enables the Breadcrumbs system to be deployed gradually, since it only enhances the existing location-based routing mechanism (i.e. IP-based routing). In this paper we evaluate the performance of a network where Breadcrumbs is only partially deployed. Our simulation results show Breadcrumbs performs poorly when sparsely deployed. However, if an overlay of Breadcrumbs-supporting routers is set-up, system performance is greatly improved. We believe that the reduced load on servers achieved with even a limited deployment of Breadcrumbs-supporting routers, combined with the flexibility of being able to deploy the system gradually, should motivate further investigation and eventual deployment of Breadcrumbs. In the paper, we also evaluate more coarse level than router level, i.e. ISP-level Breadcrumbs deployment issues. Our evaluation results show that Higher-layer first deployment approach obtains great improvement caused by Breadcrumbs redirections because of traffic aggregation in higher layer ISP.

In-network guidance to off-path cache, Breadcrumbs, has been proposed for cache network. It guides content requests to off-path cached contents by using the latest content download direction pointer, breadcrumbs. In Breadcrumbs, breadcrumb pointer is overwritten when a new content download of the corresponding content passes through a router. There is a possibility that slightly old guidance information for popular contents might lead to better cached content than the latest one. In this paper, we propose a new in-network guidance, Multiple-Breadcrumbs, which holds old breadcrumbs even with the latest breadcrumb pointer generated with a new content download. We focus on its content search capability and propose Throughput Sensitive selection that selects the content source giving the best estimated throughput. Our performance evaluation gives interesting results that our proposed Multiple Breadcrumbs with Throughput Sensitive selection improves not only throughput for popular contents but also for unpopular contents.