Multicast Distribution of Web Documents on the Internet

The success of the World Wide Web and the Internet is causing great demand of bandwidth, increasing the latency and overloading popular servers. We propose an approach to treat very popular and frequently changed web documents using a continuously reliable multicast transmission. The benefits are very efficient use of the network resources, a reduction on the server's load, lower response times and scalability to many receivers. We analyze the issues involved in the bandwidth gain for a reliable multicast delivery using a forward error correction code (FEC). We also describe the latency analysis (some experimental results are presented) as well as the server's load behavior. 1 Introduction The exponential growth of the Internet is placing great demand on bandwidth, increasing the latency and overloading popular servers. There is a significant ongoing research related to the performance of WWW systems. One of the most popular approaches is to use caching servers. A server-initiated sch..