Marcos N. Novaes

Beacon: A Hierarchical Network Topology Monitoring System Based on IP Multicast

This paper presents Beacon, a technique that exploits the advantages of IP multicast to provide a low overhead system for network topology monitoring. Beacon is a self-organizing system which builds a self similar network topology that enables the system to converge very quickly even at a high degree of scalability. Another property of the Beacon system is that it does not require any interdomain routing protocol for IP multicast, making its deployment possible even in subnetworks which are interconnected by domains which do not support IP multicast routing or that deploy different routing protocols. One desirable side effect of the deployment of beacon is that it acts as a self configuring IP multicast tunneling facility which provides a distributed system with fault tolerant IP multicast reacheability. A comparison of Beacon with several other routing and gateway protocols is discussed.

Commercial applications of grid computing

This paper provides an overview of commercial applications of Grid computing. We discuss Web performance and present a Grid caching architecture. Our Grid caching architecture offloads requests to Grid caches when Web servers become overloaded. We describe performance and traffic modeling techniques which can enhance Grid applications such as caching. We also discuss how Grid computing can be applied to financial applications. A key requirement here is that fast response times are needed. We present a Grid services scheduler that is well suited to commercial applications requiting fast response times.

Orthogonal layered multicast: improving the multicast transmission of multimedia streams at multiple data rates

This paper discusses orthogonality in layered multicast schemes, and presents a general framework for the implementation of layered multicast. This framework can be applied to standard IP multicast or to any other multicast technology capable of transmitting a data stream to a group of subscriber nodes. The multirate transmission is accomplished by a multicast group management facility which maps the frames of the multimedia stream into a number of multicast groups according to different data resolutions. The subscriber nodes can then directly control the data rate of the stream that they receive by joining different multicast groups, thus eliminating the need for constant data rate negotiation with the sender node.