Scribe: a large-scale and decentralized application-level multicast infrastructure

TLDR

Scribe is designed for application‑level multicast with support for many groups and large member counts. The paper introduces Scribe, a scalable application‑level multicast infrastructure. Scribe is built atop Pastry, using its peer‑to‑peer routing, reliability, self‑organization, and locality to create groups, construct efficient multicast trees, and provide best‑effort reliability that can be extended for stronger guarantees. Simulations on realistic topologies show that Scribe scales to large groups, balances node load, and achieves delay and link stress comparable to IP multicast.

Abstract

This paper presents Scribe, a scalable application-level multicast infrastructure. Scribe supports large numbers of groups, with a potentially large number of members per group. Scribe is built on top of Pastry, a generic peer-to-peer object location and routing substrate overlayed on the Internet, and leverages Pastry's reliability, self-organization, and locality properties. Pastry is used to create and manage groups and to build efficient multicast trees for the dissemination of messages to each group. Scribe provides best-effort reliability guarantees, and we outline how an application can extend Scribe to provide stronger reliability. Simulation results, based on a realistic network topology model, show that Scribe scales across a wide range of groups and group sizes. Also, it balances the load on the nodes while achieving acceptable delay and link stress when compared with Internet protocol multicast.