An end-user who wants to participate in group communication on the Internet must first resolve the session information including the contents type, data source and destination addresses. An effective session directory system is therefore the necessary component for the delivery of the maximum group communication value to a large number of world-wide users. In this paper, we formalize a distributed session directory system called "Channel Reflector (CR)." The advantage of CR is that, while an end-user can retrieve interesting session information from CR through a regular web interface, there is no contradiction to the dynamic nature of the session announcement scheme and the scoping technique in this architecture. For the deployment purpose, we show the actual implementation and the measurement results on the session synchronization delay given by the PlanetLab overlay network testbed.

Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) is recognized as the most feasible multicast communication model for a wide use throughout the Internet because it eliminates many complexities associated with traditional many-to-many multicast communication model. Regarding the SSM communication, however, implementations of the Internet Group Multicast Protocol version 3 (IGMPv3) for IPv4 and the Multicast Listener Discovery version 2 (MLDv2) for IPv6 are indispensable on every end-host. Accurate implementations of these protocols are necessary studies for the smooth deployment. In this document, we illustrate IGMPv3 and MLDv2 host-side implementations applied to the 4.4BSD kernel. While presenting the concept and the design of these implementations, we verify the behavior and evaluate the response times for (*,G) and (S,G) joins requested on top of both implementations.

This paper presents a design and implementation of a ATM multicast service based on programmable and active network concepts. It aims to address the design and implementation issues of creating new network services--multicast in this case--through a set of corba-based network interfaces, and with a java based user codes injection mechanism for supporting customization of network services. We demonstrate the feasibility of our prototype through the implementation of a wavelet video multicast application with active filters implanted at intermediate nodes for supporting heterogeneous receivers and the implementation of a congestion control scheme. The performance of the prototype over an ATM test-bed is measured and evaluated.

Parallel processing is a well-known approach to enhance the performance of communication subsystems. The several forms of parallelism embedded in communication protocols have been applied to the OSI protocol stack. However, the OSI protocol stack involves sequential processing due to the layered architecture. Thus, all the layers have been prevented from performing immediate processing as soon as the data arrives. To solve the problem, we apply a Multiple Instruction Single Data (MISD) parallel scheme to OSI processing for the network layer through the presentation layer. In the MISD scheme, different processors can be allocated to different layers and concurrently run the code for each layer. In contrast, the conventional approach adopts for a pipeline scheme that all the layers can be assigned to different pipeline stages and will be performed in a time interval and their dependence. The implementations have been performed to compare the pipeline scheme with the MISD scheme on the Parsytec Super Cluster consisting of 64 Transputers. The measures show that the MISD scheme has performance improvement as high as about 84% in comparison with the pipeline one.

It has become more important to reduce the protocol implementation costs as the functions of protocols have become more abundant. The protocol implementation tools which automatically generate a protocol program from a specification described by an FDT (Formal Description Technique) are very promising. Selecting SDL as a target FDT, we have developed an SDL-based protocol implementation tool which consists of a process scheduler and a compiler. Since the efficient SDL process execution is a key to generating the high-speed program, the scheduler is introduced. It provides the mechanism which executes SDL processes concurrently as light-weight-processes. It optimizes so that as few context switches take places as possible. The compiler converts as many kinds of SDL functions whose behaviors can be determined at compile time into programming language statements as possible. These elaborations are so successful that the tool can generate an efficient program. The OSI Transport protocol class 0 program generated by the compiler can process more than 500 packets per second on a 6MIPS workstation.