Analysis of The Logistic Distribution Use in The Suppression Technique for Scalability in Multicast Routing

The immense growth of the computer-supported communication systems, especially the internet, made it imperative to design protocols that have to be efficient and scalable to support the work of the networks infrastructure. By scalable is meant the ability of the protocol to cope with the requirements of groups of the communicating processes when they grow very large in size. The ever increasing demand on communication and the high capability of modern networks call continuously for efficient solutions to problems of communication. Among these solutions was the introduction of multicast routing and also the use of periodic unacknowledged messaging. Related to these two solutions of the problem of scalability, certain techniques were used to overcome this problem, including the suppression technique. This study deals with utilizing probabilistic distribution functions (pdfs) in the suppression technique with the aim of improvement of scalability of multicast routing in communication networks. The two most employed distributions in the suppression techniques are the uniform and the exponential distributions, the first outperforms the second in the performance time metric, while the exponential excels in the performance metric of extra messages. This study introduces a modified form of the logistic distribution as a candidate for use in the suppression technique and compares it with the two other above mentioned distributions. The MATLAB software was used in calculating the values of the performance metrics and in drawing the corresponding figures for comparing the results. The logistic distribution was proved to excel or compete with the other two pdfs in time performance metrics and to have a comparable performance in the overhead metrics.