Minicast: a multicast-anycast protocol for message delivery

Anycast and multicast are two important Internet services. Combining the two protocols can provide new and practical services. In this paper we propose a new Internet service, Minicast: in the scenario of n replicated or similar servers, deliver a message to at least m members, 1 m n. Such a service has potential applications in information retrieval, parallel computing, cache queries, etc. The service can provide the same Internet service with an optimal cost, reducing bandwidth consumption, network delay, and so on. We design a multi-core tree based architecture for the Minicast service and present the criteria for calculating the subcores among a subset of Minicast members. Simulation shows that the proposed architecture can even the Minicast traffic, and the Minicast application can save the consumptions of network resource.