Here is an explanation of why our Secure, Reliable, Accountable Multicasting is needed and why it is so important.

One of the easiest ways to understand the motivation for our product is to turn the clock back to when bright young minds were working on a method for computers of dissimilar brands to communicate. Back in those times, computers from Digital Equipment Corp, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and others could not communicate with each other.
Because of this lack of communication, developing a groundbreaking technology to inter-network dissimilar computers together was important.  A group of computer engineers came up with the idea to have an “inter-networking message processor – IMP”.

This “IMPs”, as they were called, would relay packets of information based on the best route to that information’s final destination. The “IMPs” were given the brains to autonomously figure out the best route for the data. If there were a failure, the IMPs would then re-route the information to what they considered to be the best choice for the packet to be delivered to its destination. The protocol (set of rules) of the packets of information that the IMPs carried was called “Internet Protocol” commonly known today as “IP”. There was one very important problem with this system.

There was no guarantee that all of the packets would arrive.

IMPs Re-route the packet to compensate but sometimes the packet is lost.

The ability to connect different computers of dissimilar manufacture was impressive (to say the least), so the Defense Department, which had a lot of dissimilar computers to connect, invested some research money with a few wireless guys, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who were trying to solve the problem of “IP packet loss” in radio communications. Building onto the earlier work of the “IMP”s creator’s and their “Internetwork Protocol” the Defense Department engineers engineered a solution was they called “Transmission Control Protocol”. The Internet of today is based on Transmission Control Protocol running on top of Internet Protocol or TCP/IP.   TCP was built “on top” on the Internetworking Protocol (IP) or in other words TCP used the Internetworking Protocol as its base.

This type of building block development is now called “the Internet way”.

So what does this have to do with World Multicast?

The idea of an Internet Protocol transmission of one sender to many receivers was invented by Professor David Cheriton from Stanford University and championed at the Interent Engineering Task Force by Steven Deering.  He called this new protocol (set of rules) “IP Multicast” (Internet Protocol Multicast). Cheriton proposed that packet information could be duplicated by the IMPs (now called routers) so that multiple receivers can tap into that same stream of information.

Cherition’s Multicasting Protocol is built on top of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP is an extended Interent Protocol (IP)), similar to TCP. Once again the designers of the Multicasting Protocol just as the earlier designers of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) had concluded, “Packet loss is not our problem”.   Cheriton’s Multicasting protocol had this same problem as the Internetworking protocol, not Reliable (in the Internet sense), not Secure, and no way to measure audience (Accountable). The same type of problem that the defense department had years ago when they commissioned a solution – Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

The Multicast ‘mouse’ was finding his way through the maze so to speak; however, there is no way to guarantee that that ‘mouse’ had arrived.

This is the reason why World Multicast invented a Secure Reliable and Accountable way to Multicast on the Public Internet. World Multicast’s solution uses the underlying base of the Multicasting infrastructure already built. However, it adds on to the top of that structure a secure., reliable, and accountable method to implement communications.

SMARTcast is a way to send Multicasting data-grams with Security, Reliability and Accountability.  Our SMARTcast protocol guarantees the packets of information will arrive at their destination.  SMART will resend those packets based on where they are needed.  SMARTCAST is the only tree based protocol that offers Security, Reliability and Accountability.

We at World Multicast are dedicated to finding Multicast solutions that are fully cost-effective. We will be continuing to build and patent even more exciting technologies as time goes on.