Senior Project - Guten-Vinci

IBM is a global information technology hardware, software, and consulting services company. Its software business provides application development, management, maintenance, and support services for both packaged software and custom applications. The Software Delivery and Fulfillment (SDF) group manages the physical and electronic delivery of all IBM software products and related publications.

Software Delivery and Fulfillment delivers software via file transfer protocols that rely on Internet Protocol (IP) unicast. The use of IP multicast would allow SDF to send one software release, including related publications, that could be delivered to an arbitrary number of customers and would thus lead to bandwidth and network expense savings. Any viable multicast delivery system needed to be reliable, secure, and massively scalable. Existing IP Multicast schemes were either reliable or secure, but not both. Those that were secure were seldom scalable.

To demonstrate that reliable and secure multicast can be used to efficiently distribute software, a proof-of-concept network layer multicast application was implemented and an initial analysis of its performance was made. The multicast application uses an open source implementation of the Asynchronous Layered Coding (ALC) protocol and its companion File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport (FLUTE) protocol to provide reliable multicast delivery and the open source OpenSSL library to secure files while in transit. The application was implemented using C and C++.