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NANOG Meeting Presentation Abstract

Multicasting Worked on 9/11
Meeting: NANOG23
Date / Time: 2001-10-22 9:50am - 10:10am
Room: OCC East
Presenters: Speakers:

Marshall Eubanks, Multicast Technologies

Marshall Eubanks, CTO at Multicast Technologies Inc., since its founding in 1999, develops multicast applications for broadcasting, content delivery, and one-to-many file transfer. He is also responsible for multicast monitoring at Multicast Technologies and in the effort to protect multicast against denial of service attacks.
Prashant Rajvaidya, UC Santa Barbara.
Rich Mavrogeanes, Vbrick.
Abstract: On the morning of September 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, many Internet users tried to get news and information over the Internet, only to be met with sluggish performance or unavailable websites. These problems were compounded for users in New York because of the general unavailability of terrestrial broadcasts after the structural failure of the World Trade Center. By contrast, multicasting, which was designed to deal with sudden audience spikes, did not suffer any known outages, and multicast video audiences increased to unprecedented levels. At Networld+Interop in Atlanta, which was ongoing at the time of the attacks, \"the crowds around the one [multicast] display had grown so large as to constitute a fire hazard, [while] all the major news web sites had completely melted down.\"



The events of 9/11 show that multicasting is a robust, real-world product capable of performing well under difficult conditions. Multicasting is robust to increased traffic loads, both because it limits the bandwidth being consumed, and because the control traffic is robust under packet loss. This robustness will considerably increase with the adoption of Single Source Multicast (SSM), which significantly reduces the amount of required control traffic.



Multicasting is sensitive, of course, to degradation in the underlying Internet infrastructure. While this was not a problem on 9/11, it was a problem in the days afterwards, as data exchange facilities near the World Trade Center found it hard to stay in service. For the most part, any outages were sporadic and quickly routed around.



Multicast video was a major source of news on 9/11, with a video audience of 2000+ receivers, and undoubtedly a considerably larger number of viewers. The increased traffic lasted for much of the rest of the week. This shows that multicasting can be used to disseminate information under trying conditions, and that a critical mass of people is able to receive this information. Multicasting would thus seem to be an obvious adjunct to the existing Emergency Alert System (EAS).



This presentation will focus on the observed multicast traffic on and after the attacks on 9/11, how the multicast Internet behaved under stress, and what these observations imply about multicast security and robustness.
Files: pptMarshall Eubanks Presentation(PPT)
youtubeMulticasting Worked on 9/11
Sponsors: None.

Back to NANOG23 agenda.

NANOG23 Abstracts

  • Multicasting Worked on 9/11
    Speakers:
    Marshall Eubanks, Multicast Technologies; Prashant RajvaidyaUC Santa Barbara; .
    Rich MavrogeanesVbrick; .
  • Multicasting Worked on 9/11
    Speakers:
    Marshall Eubanks, Multicast Technologies; Prashant RajvaidyaUC Santa Barbara; .
    Rich MavrogeanesVbrick; .
  • Multicasting Worked on 9/11
    Speakers:
    Marshall Eubanks, Multicast Technologies; Prashant RajvaidyaUC Santa Barbara; .
    Rich MavrogeanesVbrick; .

 
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