CONGRESS: CONnection-oriented group address RESolution service

This paper presents CONGRESS: a CONnection-oriented Group-address RESolution Service, and its applications. CONGRESS is an efficient native ATM protocol for resolution and management of multicast group addresses in an ATM WAN. It complements the native ATM multicast mechanisms. CONGRESS resolves multicast group addresses and maintains their membership for applications. It is not designed to handle the applications' data-exchange. Applications can use the resolved addresses returned by CONGRESS, in order to implement a many-to-many communication model.CONGRESS employs hierarchically organized servers in order to be scalable. CONGRESS' hierarchy is naturally mapped onto the ATM Private Network to Network Interface peer group hierarchy. CONGRESS communication overhead for management of a single multicast group is linear in the size of the group. Apart from facilitating native ATM multicast applications, CONGRESS can be used for the implementation of an IP multicast "cut-through" routing over ATM. The cut-through routing paradigm is conceived as one of the most promising techniques for enabling the traditional IP-based communication with QoS. Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons, the building of scalable IP multicast cut-through protocols is non-trivial. We claim that a multicast address resolution and maintenance service like CONGRESS, can greatly contribute to the development of scalable IP cut-through routing services. A conceptual cut-through routing solution, IP multicast SErvice for Non-broadcast Access networking TEchnology (IP-SENATE), built on top of CONGRESS and scalable to a large ATM cloud is sketched.