Multi-Site Multicast Experiments on Grid’5000
CoNEXT Companion ’26, December 07–10, 2026, Utrecht, Netherlands · 2026
Abstract
Interest in IP Multicast is growing again as a way to reduce duplicate traffic, with recent proposals such as BIER, AMT, and multicast extensions for QUIC. Evaluating multicast pro- tocols and applications requires many receivers distributed in realistic topologies. Existing techniques are rarely suited to multicast evaluations, e.g., emulators may not support multicast protocols, and large testbeds such as Grid’5000 do not support inter-site multicast routing. We present GEM, a framework that builds multi-site multicast topologies on Grid’5000. GEM deploys a multicast router running PIM and OSPF in each cluster, and connects them with GRE tunnels. GEM multiplexes receivers as network namespaces on bare- metal Linux servers. We demonstrate GEM with a Flexicast QUIC source serving 300 receivers across four sites, and ob- serve run-to-run variance of up to 7.3 s in transfer duration for 10 MB files, a group-wide effect that evaluations with few homogeneous receivers may not reveal.
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Cite (BibTeX)
@inproceedings{2026detry-multicast-grid5000-poster,
title={Multi-Site Multicast Experiments on Grid’5000},
author={Corentin Detry, Louis Navarre, and Olivier Bonaventure},
booktitle={CoNEXT Companion ’26, December 07–10, 2026, Utrecht, Netherlands },
pages={1--3},
year={2026},
organization={ACM}
}