Librecast:Testing

BASIC INFORMATION

Short name: Librecast:Testing
Long name: Librecast: IoT Software Updates over IPv6 Multicast

Company: Librecast
Country: France

Call: F4Fp-SME-COD210601 (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-SME-COD210601-05

SUMMARY REMARKS & TESTBEDS

Multicast is an underutilized and misunderstood network technology. It is used less than unicast, yet an argument can be made that in today’s interconnected world with large-scale one-to-many and many-to-many communications the opposite should be true. The Librecast Project is making that argument. Technologists consider multicast as mainly useful for streaming audio and video. Whilst multicast is good for real-time streaming, it is even better suited to non-streaming applications. Unicast systems want to spread out load spikes.

To handle spikes, unicast systems throw more resources at the problem: more and bigger servers, caching and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). This has both a financial and an environmental cost which we can measure. With multicast, the server load remains the same for any number of clients and more simultaneous clients actually reduces our total bandwidth and resource usage. Multicast can tighten the update window to a shorter interval, allowing the use of on-demand cloud computing resources. This application aims to provide experimental backing for perhaps the simplest and most universal of real-world applications: software updates. We propose a series of experiments to compare software updates using unicast and multicast IoT networks to measure efficiencies gained by using multicast.

MATERIALS