- Beefing Up the Protocol
- Patching the Holes
- Putting Multicast into Practice
- Improving the Program
- Solving Some Problems
Solving Some Problems
All is not lost for those with limited bandwidth, however. In fact, you can get the data you want with the supplied programs as long as the data throughput is lowered a little. Also, a new multicast technology called small group multicast (SGM) is in the works, and promises to solve many multicasting problems.
Datagrams and multicasting, when used in the right way, can reduce the load on our networks and increase the current throughput. Some applications that are currently written for TCP connection could fit easily in a reliable datagram protocol. If you want to learn more about these techniques, pick up Linux Socket Programming (Sams Publishing, 2001, ISBN 0-672-31935-7). You can get source code for this article from the Linux Socket web site.