15 Jul
2001
15 Jul
'01
4:33 a.m.
On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Dickson, Brian wrote:
- What is IRC, or for that matter net-news, at its heart? A transient, store-and-forward, one-to-many message system.
In otherwords, multicast re-implemented on unicast, in some cases poorly and at great cost (news).
AFAIK, there is no implemented multicasting protocol - routing and reliable transport - that can scale to the number of groups, senders and receivers visible in current IRC networks. Source-based trees would require the order of 1E6 (S,G) pairs and core/RP-based routing would be an even easier target for the SK's than IRC already is. Achieving instant group messaging on a global scale with convential multicast is unlikely. Relevant academic research continues. J