A Decentralized Software Bus based on IP Multicasting

We describe a decentralized reconfigurable implementation of a conference management system based on the low-level Internet Protocol (IP) multicasting protocol. IP multicasting allows low-cost, world-wide, two-way transmission of data between large numbers of conferencing participants through the Multicasting Backbone (MBone). Each conference is structured as a software bus --- a messaging system that provides a run-time interconnection model that acts as a separate agent (i.e., the bus) for routing, queuing, and delivering messages between distributed programs. Unlike the clientserver interconnection model, the software bus model provides a level of indirection that enhances the flexibility and reconfigurability of a distributed system. Current software bus implementations like POLYLITH [1], however, rely on a centralized bus process and point-to-point protocols (i.e., TCP/IP) to route, queue, and deliver messages. We implement a software bus called the MULTIBUS that relies on a separ..