A middleware approach for protocol-independent reliable broadcast

This paper proposes Protocol-Independent Reliable Broadcast Middleware(PIRBM) System which enables applications to easily use reliable broadcast on various networks such as datalink-layer network, application-layer network or heterogeneous network. Reliable broadcast is many-to-many communication assuring that all packets sent by a node will be received by all other nodes without data error in a communication network in finite time. This communication model is applied to link-state routing protocols to distribute the link-state of each node to all other nodes in the network. Reliable broadcast is useful for applications such as multi-player games which need to distribute data. However, such applications can not use reliable broadcast due to lack of middleware providing reliable broadcast functionality to applications for versatile purpose. Therefore, each application is required to implement complicated reliable broadcast protocol by itself. This paper proposes PIRBM System to support such applications. To enable reliable broadcast to work on various networks, PIRBM System contains datalink virtualization function. The evaluations of overhead resulting from virtualization of the datalink are also shown and the result is small enough not to affect performance.