Concast: Design and implementation of a new network service

This paper introduces concast, a new network service. Concast is the inverse of multicast: multiple sources send messages toward the same destination, which results in a single message being delivered to the destination. The received message appears to come from the concast group rather than any particular receiver. Different forms of concast service can be defined by varying the mapping from the set of sent messages to the received message. The service is useful for preventing implosion and reducing bandwidth consumption in cases where many senders transmit to the same receiver - for example in aggregating (or suppressing) positive (or negative) acknowledgements. We define the semantics of a simple concast service that is the inverse of multicast, as well as a more general custom concast, which allows users to define certain aspects of the service's semantics. We describe how to implement the service so that it scales approximately as well as IP multicast. We also present results from a simulation study showing that concast provides significant benefits in a layered-video application.