Abstract
With the flourishing development of Internet, the technology of network delivery is also progressing rapidly. One of the most important progresses is in multidestination delivery, because more and more applications now require the server to deliver data to more than one client. The traditional way to accomplish multidestination delivery is to send one message carrying the same copy of data to each of the clients. If the number of destinations is huge, this operation could be very inefficient in resource utilization and generate excessive network traffic. IP multicast is a network-layer multicast technology that reduces the network traffic by simultaneously delivering a single stream of information to multiple clients. In this thesis, we study the effects of IP multicast, especially on its influence on the server performance. A number of experiments were designed and conducted to compare the performance of multicast and unicast. Several important metrics, e.g., multicast latency and receiving throughput are used as the comparison basis. In the results of our evaluation, we find that IP multicast is scale well when the number of participants expands. As the number of receiver increases, the latency in multicast delivery is less than in replicated unicast delivery, and IP multicast gets better throughput too.